“Empower every person and every
organisation on the planet to achieve more”
The Microsoft Mission

At the core of today’s opening Worldwide Partner Conference keynote was ‘Digital Transformation’ aka the desire of CEO’s to use technology to change business outcomes – whether it be how they:

Engage their customers,

Empower employees to make better decisions,

Optimise their operations,

Build up the predictive power within their organisations so that every operation is intelligent,

Transform their products and services.

Digital Transformation = An Unprecedented Partner Opportunity

Every customer of every size business (startup to Enterprise) is not only looking to use digital technology, but to build digital technology for their own.

Businesses are looking to drive greater efficiency – automating processes and enhancing productivity, particularly in those areas where there are operating expenses. This poses an unprecedented opportunity for you no matter what partner type you are.

Microsoft Ambitions to Drive Digital Transformation

Microsoft has three core ambitions which play a fundamental part in digitally transforming businesses:

Re-inventing Productivity and Business process

Building the Intelligent Cloud

Create more Personal Computing

These will be covered in more detail over the next two days keynotes, however, Satya provided some great examples of what these 3 ambitions entail.

1) Re-inventing Productivity and Business Process

This is all about removing the barriers between productivity tools and business applications. Satya focused on two key areas:

To showcase how intelligent cloud is helping transformation, Satya invited General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, on stage to discuss how he has digitally transformed the GE business.

Considering GE is over 140 years old, it’s a company that has embraced transformation and digital transformation. You can read more about their story and find out about Microsoft’s new partnership with GE to bring Predix to Azure, accelerating digital transformation for industrial customers.

Satya then went on to talk about ‘The next phase of building the Intelligent cloud’ with ‘Cognitive services’. We’re seeing the beginnings of a new platform for cognitive services. Microsoft has taken decades of research from Microsoft Research encapsulating speech, computer vision, natural language text understanding, and made these available as API’s. These API’s are being used to infuse perception into apps – the ability for Apps/Bots to understand speech and see i.e. computer vision. These cognitive capabilities are capable of transforming business by bringing productivity gains. A great example of this is how Macdonalds are creating efficiency in their Drive Thru’s with speech/order recognition (Watch the demo 1 hour 10 minutes into the Day 1 keynote).

3) Create More Personal Computing

Create more personal computing was the third and final ambition covered. Satya discussed Windows 10 – an OS system spanning multiple devices from Raspberry PI to Hololens and bringing centralised infrastructure benefits and cost savings to business.

It was on the topic of Hololens, he discussed how personal computing is shaped by category creation moments. Moments where input and output change. ‘Mixed Reality’ is that moment. With Hololens its created an interface changing moment – Mixing real with virtual, enabling us to be anywhere and everywhere – fully untethered and mobile.

The three ambitions announced a year ago and the proof-points of healthy progress along them in FY16:

Office 365, Dynamics 365, AppSource, and LinkedIn as all being part of one overarching strategy in Productivity and Business Process:
– core part of an overarching strategy
– digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers

“Reinvent Productivity and Business Processes“, “Build the Intelligent Cloud” and “Create More Personal Computing” were the original 3 “interlocking ambitions” the Microsoft CEO talked about at Microsoft Iginite held on May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago. The proof-points of FY16 progress are shown along that list, and explained in detail by remarks from Microsoft (MSFT) Satya Nadella on Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript as of July 18, 2016.

In fact, this last quarter, some of the most strategic announcements were all around our application platform. At our partner conference, there was a significant amount of excitement with the tools that we announced like PowerApps and Power BI, Azure functions and Flow. These are tools that our developers and system integrators and solution partners will use in order to be able to customize applications around Azure. And so to me that’s another huge advantage and a competitive differentiation for us.

1.1 Core part of an overarching strategy

The move to the cloud for our customers and for us is not just about a new way of delivering the same value just as a SaaS service. It’s really the transformation from having applications that are silos to becoming more services in the cloud where you can reason about the activity and the data underneath these services to benefit the customers who are using these services. So that’s what this notion of a graph [by Microsoft Graph] represents.

So when somebody moves to Office 365, their graph [by Microsoft Graph], their people, their relationships with other people inside the organization, their work artifacts all move to the cloud. You can connect them with all the business process data that’s in Dynamics 365, but not just in Dynamics 365 but all the applications in AppSource because business process will always be a much more fragmented market as opposed to just one market share leader by industry, by vertical, by country. And so that’s our strategy there.

And now the professional cloud or the professional network helps usage across all of that professional usage. Whether it’s in Office 365 or whether you’re a salesperson using any application related to sales, you want your professional network there. Of course, it’s relevant in recruiting, it’s relevant in training, it’s relevant in marketing. So that’s really our strategy with LinkedIn as the professional network meeting the professional cloud. And these are all part of one overarching strategy, and ultimately it’s about adding value to customers.

1.2 Digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers

This past year was a pivotal one in both our transformation and in our partnerships with customers who are also driving their own digital transformation. Our progress is best captured in the results of our three ambitions, starting with Productivity and Business Process. In a world of infinite information but finite attention and time, we aim to change the nature of work with digital technology. In pursuit of this ambition, we continue to add value to our products, grow usage, and increase our addressable market. Along these lines, let me start with Office 365 and then move to Dynamics 365.

In the last quarter, we advanced our collaboration tools. We launched Microsoft Planner, which helps teams manage operations, as well as Skype Meetings, which is aimed at helping small businesses collaborate. In June, we further strengthened our security value proposition with the release of Advanced Security Management.

Lastly, we continue to add intelligence in machine learning to Office to help people automate their tasks and glean insights from data. These advancements helped to drive increased usage across enterprises, small and medium businesses, and consumers. In the enterprise, Office 365 Commercial seats grew 45% year over year, and revenue grew 59% in constant currency. Also 70% of our Office Enterprise agreement renewals are in the cloud. Innovative companies like Facebook, Hershey’s, Discovery Communications, Cushman Wakefield all adopted Office 365 and now see how transformative this service can be for their own business.

We are enthusiastic about the early feedback and growth opportunity from companies using our newly released Office 365 E5, which includes powerful security controls, advanced analytics, and cloud voice. These customers tell us that they love the simplification that comes with standardizing across all of our productivity workloads.

We will continue to grow our install base and drive premium mix through offers like Office 365 E5, but they’re very, very early days of E5. And E5 value proposition across all three of the areas, whether it’s cloud voice or analytics or security are all three massive areas for us. And I would say if anything, the initial data from our customers around security is gaining a lot of traction. But at the same time, one of the things that customers are looking for is making an enterprise-wide architectural decision across all of the workloads.

We see momentum in small and medium businesses, with a growing number of partners selling Office 365, now up to nearly 90,000, a 25% increase year over year. We continue to grab share and adding over 50,000 customers each month for 28 consecutive months.

We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers. Across segments, customers increasingly experience the power of Office on their iOS and Android mobile devices. In fact, we now have more than 50 million iOS and Android monthly active devices, up more than four times over last year.

Now let’s talk about progress with the other pillar of this ambition, Dynamics 365. We are removing any impedance that exists between productivity, collaboration, and business process. This month we took a major step forward with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. Dynamics 365 provides business users with purpose-built SaaS applications. These applications have intelligence built in. They integrate deeply with communications and collaboration capabilities of Office 365.

Dynamics 365 along with AppSource and our rich application platform introduces a disruptive and customer-centric business model so customers can build what they want and use just the capabilities they need. The launch of Dynamics 365 builds on the momentum we’re already seeing in this business. Customers around the globe are harnessing the power of Dynamics in their own transformation, including 24 Hour Fitness and AccuWeather. Overall, Dynamics now has nearly 10 million monthly paid seats, up more than 20% year over year, and Q4 billings grew more than 20% year over year.

Overall, Business Processes represent an enormous addressable market, projected to be more than $100 billion by 2020. It’s a market we are increasingly focused on, and I believe we are poised with both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource to grow and drive opportunity for our partners.

Across Office 365 and Dynamics 365, developers increasingly see the opportunity to build innovative apps and experiences with the Microsoft Graph, and we now have over 27,000 apps connected to it. Microsoft AppSource will be a new way for developers to offer their services and reach customers worldwide.

Lastly, with Office 365 and Dynamics 365, we have the opportunity to connect the world’s professional cloud and the world’s professional network with our pending LinkedIn deal. Overall, the Microsoft Cloud is winning significant customer support. With more than $12 billion in Commercial Cloud annualized revenue run rate, we are on track to achieve our goal of $20 billion in fiscal year 2018. Also, nearly 60% of the Fortune 500 companies have at least three of our cloud offerings. And we continue to grow our annuity mix of our business. In fact, commercial annuity mix increased year over year to 83%.

Note that the Q1FY16 report was that “Enterprise Mobility [Suite] customers more than doubled year-over-year to over 20,000, and the installed base grew nearly 6x year-over-year“. Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is a service available in the CSP (Cloud Solution Partner program) along with Windows Intune, Office 365, Azure and CRM Online. The reason for that very impressive growth was given by Satya Nadella in the much earlier Q2FY15 report as:

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite is one key of product innovation that I would like to highlight given the growth and uniqueness of our offering. Microsoft offers a comprehensive solution that brings together mobile device management, mobile application management, hybrid identity management and data protection into a unified offering via EMS.

Office 365 now includes new app experiences on all phones and tablets for mobile productivity. Further, we have released completely new scenarios. This includes Office Sway for visualizing and sharing ideas; Delve, to help search and discover content; Office 365 Groups to make it easier to collaborate; andOffice 365 Video for secure media streaming for businesses.

Finally, we continue to invest in enterprise value by integrating MDM and the Enterprise Mobility Suite into Office 365; new encryption technologies and compliance certifications; and new eDiscovery capabilities in Exchange.

…

Overall at the highest level, our strategy here is to make sure that the Microsoft Services i.e. cloud services be it Azure, Office 365, CRM Online or Enterprise Mobility Suite are covering all the devices out there in the marketplace. So that, that way we maximize the opportunity we have for each of these subscription and capacity based services.

2.1 Enterprise cloud leadership

Now let’s get into the specifics of the Intelligent Cloud, an area of massive opportunity, as we are clearly one of the two enterprise cloud leaders. Companies looking to digitally transform need a trusted cloud partner and turn to Microsoft. As a result, Azure revenue and usage again grew by more than 100% this quarter. We see customers choose Microsoft for three reasons. They want a cloud provider that offers solutions that reflect the realities of today’s world and their enterprise-grade needs. They want higher level services to drive digital transformation, and they want a cloud open to developers of all types. Let me expand on each.

To start, a wide variety of customers turn to Azure because of their specific real-world needs. Multinationals choose us because we are the only hybrid and hyperscale cloud spanning multiple jurisdictions. We cover more countries and regions than any other cloud provider, from North America to Asia to Europe to Latin America. Our cloud respects data sovereignty and makes it possible for an enterprise application to work across these regions and jurisdictions. More than 80% of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers because of our leadership support for regulatory requirements, advanced security, and commitment to privacy. Large ISVs like SAP and Citrix as well as startups like Sprinklr also choose Azure because of our global reach and a broad set of platform services. Last week GE announced it will adopt our cloud for its IoT approach.

Next, Azure customers also value our unique higher-level services. Now at 33,000, we nearly doubled in one year the number of companies worldwide that have selected our Enterprise Mobility Solutions. The Dow Chemical Company leverages EMS along with Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics to give its thousands of employees secure real-time access to data and apps from anywhere.

Just yesterday, we announced Boeing will use Azure, our IoT suite, and Cortana Intelligence to drive digital transformation in commercial aviation, with connected airline systems optimization, predictive maintenance, and much more. This builds on great momentum in IoT, including our work with Rolls-Royce, Schneider Electric, and others.

This is great progress, but our ambitions are set even higher. Our Intelligent Cloud also enables cognitive services. Cortana Intelligence Suite offers machine learning capabilities and advanced predictive analytics. Customers like Jabil Circuit, Fruit of the Loom, Land O’Lakes, LIBER already realize the benefits of these new capabilities.

Lastly, central to our Intelligent Cloud ambition is providing developers with the tools and capabilities they need to build apps and services for the platforms and devices of their choice. We have the best support for what I would say is the most open platform for all developers. Not only is .NET first class but Linux is first class, Java is first class. The new Azure Container service cuts across both containers running on Windows, running across Linux. So again, it speaks to the enterprise reality. .NET Core 1.0 for open source and our ongoing work with companies such as Red Hat, Docker, and Mesosphere also reflects significant progress on this front. We continue to see traction from open source, with nearly a third of customer virtual machines on Azure running Linux.

So those would be the places where we are fairly differentiated, and that’s what you see us gaining both for enterprise customers and ISVs.

On the server side, premium server revenue grew double digits in constant currency year over year. New SQL Server 2016 helps us expand into new markets with built-in advanced analytics and unparalleled performance. More than 15,000 customers, including over 50% of the Fortune 500, have registered for the private preview of SQL Server for Linux. And we’re not slowing down. We will launch Windows Server 2016 and System Server 2016 later this year.

2.2 Every customer is also an ISV

One of the phenomena now is that pretty much anyone who is a customer of Azure is also in some form an ISV, and that’s no longer just limited to people who are “in the classic tech industry” or the software business. So every customer who starts off consuming Azure is also turning what is their IP in most cases into an ISV solution, which ultimately will even participate in AppSource. So at least the vision that we have is that every customer is a digital company that will have a digital IP component to it, and that we want to be able to partner with them in pretty unique ways.

That’s the same case with GE. It’s the same case with Boeing. It’s the same case with Schneider Electric or ABB or any one of the customers we are working with because they all are taking some of their assets and converting them into SaaS applications on Azure. And that’s something that we will in fact have distribution agreements with.

And AppSource is a pretty major announcement for us because we essentially created for SaaS applications and infrastructure applications a way to distribute their applications through us and our channel. And I think it makes in fact our cloud more attractive to many of them because of that. So we look – I think going forward, you’ll look to see – or you’ll see us do much more of this with many other customers of ours.

The focus for us is in what I describe as this hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach when you think about the current approach, which is pretty unique to us. Overall, I believe this hyperscale plus hybrid architecturally helps us a lot with enterprise customers because we meet them where their realities are today and also the digital transformation needs going forward, so that’s one massive advantage we have.

And the way we track progress is to see how is our annuity growth of our server business, and how is our cloud growth. And if you look at this last quarter, our annuity grew double digits and our cloud grew triple digits. And that’s a pretty healthy growth rate, and that’s something that by design both in terms of the technical architecture as well as the traction we have in the marketplace and our sales efforts and so on are playing out well, and we are very bullish about that going forward.

The Transactional business is much more volatile because of the macro environment, IT budgets, and also the secular shift to the cloud. The question again that gets asked is about the cannibalization. But if you look at Boeing or you look at any of the other examples that I talk about when it comes to the cloud, our servers never did what these customers are now doing in our cloud. So at a fundamental long-term secular basis, we have new growth, new workloads, and that’s what we are focused on, and that’s a much bigger addressable market than anything our Transactional Server business had in the past.

[Amy E. Hood – Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President:]
The first thing really that I think Satya and I both focus on every quarter, every month, is how much of our business are we continuing to shift to annuity and specifically to the cloud. We structure all of our motions at this company, from how we engineer to how we do our go-to-markets to how we think about sales engagement to how we do our investments, fundamentally toward that long-term structural transition in the market.

In terms of server products and services, I tend to think of it as the all-up growth. It’s really about growing the cloud, growing the hybrid, and then whatever happens in the Transactional business happens.

And so to your question on Transactional performance, there were some deals that didn’t get done in Q3 that got done in Q4, and there were some deals done in Q4 on the Office side with large companies that I’m thrilled by. But at the same time, we still will focus on those deals moving to the cloud over time. And so this volatility that we are going to see because of macro and because of budget constraints, especially on Transactional, we will focus on because we expect excellent execution and have accountability to do that in the field. But our first priority, every time, is to make sure we are focused on annuity growth and digital transformation at our company, which is best done through that motion.

In terms of the sales motion they are absolutely incented more towards cloud versus Transactional going into this year.

I do believe that every conversation that we’re having with customers is cloud-led. That cloud-led conversation and making a plan for customers to best change and transform their own business certainly is a far more in-depth one than on occasion is required by long-time Transactional purchasers, especially in Office, as an example, because what we’re talking about now is really pivoting your business for the long term.

And so I’m sure there are examples where that has elongated the sales cycle, for good reason. But I would generally point back and say most of these are driven at the structural level, which is – structurally over time, on-premises Transactional business will move to the cloud or to a hybrid structure through an annuity revenue stream.
[END BY Amy E. Hood]

2.4 Meeting cloud needs of customers where they are

The position that we have taken is that we want to serve customers where they are and not assume very simplistically that the digital sovereignty needs of customers can be met out of a fewer data center approach. Because right now, given the secular trend to move to the cloud across all of the regulated industries across the globe, we think it’s wiser for us and our investors long term to be able to meet them where they are. And that’s what you see us. We are the only cloud that operates in China under Chinese law, the only cloud that operates in Germany under German law. And these are very critical competitive advantages to us.

And so we will track that, and we will be very demand driven. So in this case we’re not taking these positions of which regions to open and where to open them well in advance of our demand. If anything, I think our cycle times have significantly come down. So it will be demand-driven, but I don’t want to essentially put a cap because if the opportunity arises, and for us it’s a high ROI decision to open a new region, we will do so.

We have increased Windows 10 monthly active devices and are now at more than 350 million. This is the fastest adoption rate of any prior Windows release. While we are proud of these results, given changes to our phone plan, we changed how we will assess progress. Going forward, we will track progress by regularly reporting the growth of Windows 10 monthly active devices in addition to progress on three aspects of our Windows strategy:

3.1 Deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers

We continue to pursue our goal of moving people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows. In two weeks, we will launch Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which takes a significant step forward in security. We are also extending Windows Hello to support apps and websites and delivering a range of new features like Windows Ink and updates to Microsoft Edge. We expect these advances will drive increased adoption of Windows 10, particularly in the enterprise, in the coming year. We already have strong traction, with over 96% of our enterprise customers piloting Windows 10.

As we grow our install base and engagement, we generate more opportunity for Microsoft and our ecosystem. Bing profitability continues to grow, with greater than 40% of the search revenue in June from Windows 10 devices. Bing PC query share in the United States approached 22% this quarter, not including volume from AOL and Yahoo!. The Cortana search box has over 100 million monthly active users, with 8 billion questions asked to date.

We continue to drive growth in gaming by connecting fans on Xbox Live across Windows 10, iOS, and Android. Just this quarter we launched our Minecraft Realm subscription on Android and iOS. Overall engagement on Xbox Live is at record levels, with more than 49 million monthly active users, up 33% year over year. At E3 we announced our biggest lineup of exclusive games ever for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. And we announced Xbox Play Anywhere titles, where gamers can buy a game once and play it on both their Windows 10 PC and Xbox One. We also announced two new members of the Xbox One console family, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio.

The Windows Store continues to grow, with new universal Windows apps like Bank of America, Roku, SiriusXM, Instagram, Facebook, Wine, Hulu, and popular PC games like Quantum Break.

3.3 Innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs

Our hardware partners are embracing the new personal computing vision, with over 1,500 new devices designed to take advantage of Windows 10 innovations like Touch, Pen, Hello, and better performance and power efficiency.

Microsoft’s family of Surface devices continues to drive category growth, and we are reaching more commercial customers of all sizes with the support of our channel partners. We recently announced new Surface enterprise initiatives with IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton to enable more customer segments. Also in the past year, we grew our commercial Surface partner channel from over 150 to over 10,000.

Lastly this quarter, more and more developers and enterprise customers got to experience two entirely new device categories from Microsoft Surface Hub and Microsoft HoloLens. While we are still in the early days of both of these devices, we are seeing great traction with both enterprise customers and developers, making us optimistic about future growth.

Note that the father born in São Paulo, Brazil has built a very successfull business since he started working at CT Miami in 1969. In October 2010 the operation already spread over to a number of countries in Americas and surely to China as the manufacturing base:

As of September 2014 CT MIAMI has local offices and representatives in Miami, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Shenzhen, Trinidad & Tobago and Venezuela. Alltogether these companies as well as the BLU Products are parts of CT Group LLC with total staff of between 200-500.

July 22 (Bloomberg) — When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defined the future of his company in a memo to his 127,100 employees, he singled out the struggling Surface tablet as key to a future built around the cloud and productivity. Microsoft assembled an elite team of designers, engineers, and programmers to spend years holed up in Redmond, Washington to come up with a tablet to take on Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson got an inside look at the Surface labs.

July 23 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft’s motion detecting camera was thought to be a game changer for the video gaming world when it was launched in 2010. While appetite for it has since decreased, Microsoft sees the technology as vital in its broader offering as it explores other sectors like 3d mapping and live surgery. (Source: Bloomberg

In this video, Pier 1 Imports discuss how they are using Microsoft Cloud technologies such as Azure Machine Learning to to predict which the product the customer might want to purchase next, helping to build a better relationship with their customers. Learn more: http://www.azure.com/ml

http://cnet.co/1nOygqh Microsoft made a direct comparison between the Surface Pro 3 and the MacBook Air 13″, so we’re throwing them into the Prizefight Ring to settle the score once and for all. Let’s get it on!

Thank you. And Amy one quick question, we saw a significant acceleration this quarter in cloud revenue, or I guess Amy or Satya. You saw acceleration in cloud revenue year-over-year what’s – is this Office for the iPad, is this Azure, what’s driving the acceleration and how long do you think we can keep this going?

Mark, I will take it and if Satya wants to add, obviously, he should do that. In general, I wouldn’t point to one product area. It was across Office 365, Azure and even CRM online. I think some of the important dynamics that you could point to particularly in Office 365; I really think over the course of the year, we saw an acceleration in moving the product down the market into increasing what we would call the mid-market and even small business at a pace. That’s a particular place I would tie back to some of the things Satya mentioned in the answer to your first question.

Improvements to analytics, improvements to understanding the use scenarios, improving the product in real-time, understanding trial ease of use, ease of sign-up all of these things actually can afford us the ability to go to different categories, go to different geos into different segments. And in addition, I think what you will see more as we initially moved many of our customers to Office 365, it came on one workload. And I think what we’ve increasingly seen is our ability to add more workloads and sell the entirety of the suite through that process. I also mentioned in Azure, our increased ability to sell some of these higher value services. So while, I can speak broadly but all of them, I think I would generally think about the strength of being both completion of our product suite ability to enter new segments and ability to sell new workloads.

The only thing I would add is it’s the combination of our SaaS like Dynamics in Office 365, a public cloud offering in Azure. But also our private and hybrid cloud infrastructure which also benefits, because they run on our servers, cloud runs on our servers. So it’s that combination which makes us both unique and reinforcing. And the best example is what we are doing with Azure active directory, the fact that somebody gets on-boarded to Office 365 means that tenant information is in Azure AD that fact that the tenant information is in Azure AD is what makes EMS or our Enterprise Mobility Suite more attractive to a customer manager iOS, Android or Windows devices. That network effect is really now helping us a lot across all of our cloud efforts.

Excellent, thank you for the question and a very nice quarter. First, I think to talk a little bit about the growth strategy of Nokia, you guys look to cut expenses pretty aggressively there, but this is – particularly smartphones is a very competitive marketplace, can you tell us a little bit about sort of the strategy to how you actually start to gain share with Lumia on a going forward basis? And may be give us an idea of what levels of share or what levels of kind unit volumes are you going to need to hit to get to that breakeven in FY16?

Let me start and Amy you can even add. So overall, we are very focused on I would say thinking about mobility share across the entire Windows family. I already talked about in my remarks about how mobility for us even goes beyond devices, but for this specific question I would even say that, we want to think about mobility not just one form factor of a mobile device because I think that’s where the ultimate price is.

But that said, we are even year-over-year basis seen increased volume for Lumia, it’s coming at the low end in the entry smartphone market and we are pleased with it. It’s come in many markets we now have over 10% that’s the first market I would sort of say that we need to track country-by-country. And the key places where we are going to differentiate is looking at productivity scenarios or the digital work and life scenario that we can light up on our phone in unique ways.

When I can take my Office Lens App use the camera on the phone take a picture of anything and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion that’s the unique scenario. What we have done with Surface and PPI shows us the way that there is a lot more we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity. So this is not about just a Word or Excel on your phone, it is about thinking about Cortana and Office Lens and those kinds of scenarios in compelling ways. And that’s what at the end of the day is going to drive our differentiation and higher end Lumia phones.

And Keith to answer your specific question, regarding FY16, I think we’ve made the difficult choices to get the cost base to a place where we can deliver, on the exact scenario Satya as outlined, and we do assume that we continue to grow our units through the year and into 2016 in order to get to breakeven.

Thanks. I’m wondering if you could talk about the Office for a moment. I’m curious whether you think we’ve seen the worst for Office here with the consumer fall off. In Office 365 growth in margins expanding their – just sort of if you can look through the dynamics and give us a sense, do you think you are actually turned the corner there and we may be seeing the worse in terms of Office growth and margins?

Rick, let me just start qualitatively in terms of how I view Office, the category and how it relates to productivity broadly and then I’ll have Amy even specifically talk about margins and what we are seeing in terms of I’m assuming Office renewals is that probably the question. First of all, I believe the category that Office is in, which is productivity broadly for people, the group as well as organization is something that we are investing significantly and seeing significant growth in.

On one end you have new things that we are doing like Cortana. This is for individuals on new form factors like the phones where it’s not about anything that application, but an intelligent agent that knows everything about my calendar, everything about my life and tries to help me with my everyday task.

On the other end, it’s something like Delve which is a completely new tool that’s taking some – what is enterprise search and making it more like the Facebook news feed where it has a graph of all my artifacts, all my people, all my group and uses that graph to give me relevant information and discover. Same thing with Power Q&A and Power BI, it’s a part of Office 365. So we have a pretty expansive view of how we look at Office and what it can do. So that’s the growth strategy and now specifically on Office renewals.

And I would say in general, let me make two comments. In terms of Office on the consumer side between what we sold on prem as well as the Home and Personal we feel quite good with attach continuing to grow and increasing the value prop. So I think that’s to address the consumer portion.

On the commercial portion, we actually saw Office grow as you said this quarter; I think the broader definition that Satya spoke to the Office value prop and we continued to see Office renewed in our enterprise agreement. So in general, I think I feel like we’re in a growth phase for that franchise.

Hi, thanks. Satya, I wanted to ask you about two statements that you made, one around responsibly making the market for Windows Phone, just kind of following on Keith’s question here. And that’s a – it’s a really competitive market it feels like ultimately you need to be a very, very meaningful share player in that market to have value for developer to leverage the universal apps that you’re talking about in terms of presentations you’ve given and build in and so forth.

And I’m trying to understand how you can do both of those things once and in terms of responsibly making the market for Windows Phone, it feels difficult given your nearest competitors there are doing things that you might argue or irresponsible in terms of making their market given that they monetize it in different ways?

Yes. One of beauties of universal Windows app is, it aggregates for the first time for us all of our Windows volume. The fact that even what is an app that runs with a mouse and keyboard on the desktop can be in the store and you can have the same app run in the touch-first on a mobile-first way gives developers the entire volume of Windows which is 300 plus million units as opposed to just our 4% share of mobile in the U.S. or 10% in some country.

So that’s really the reason why we are actively making sure that universal Windows apps is available and developers are taking advantage of it, we have great tooling. Because that’s the way we are going to be able to create the broadest opportunity to your very point about developers getting an ROI for building to Windows. For that’s how I think we will do it in a responsible way.

Great. Thank you so much for your time. I wanted to ask a question about – Satya your comments about combining the next version of Windows and to one for all devices and just wondering if you look out, I mean you’ve got kind of different SKU segmentations right now, you’ve got enterprise, you’ve got consumer less than 9 inches for free, the offering that you mentioned earlier that you recently announced. How do we think about when you come out with this one version for all devices, how do you see this changing kind of the go-to-market and also kind of a traditional SKU segmentation and pricing that we’ve seen in the past?

Yes. My statement Heather was more to do with just even the engineering approach. The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.

So that’s what more I was referencing and our SKU strategy will remain by segment, we will have multiple SKUs for enterprises, we will have for OEM, we will have for end-users. And so we will – be disclosing and talking about our SKUs as we get further along, but this my statement was more to do with how we are bringing teams together to approach Windows as one ecosystem very differently than we ourselves have done in the past.

Hi, good afternoon. Satya you made some comments about harmonizing some of the different products across consumer and enterprise and I was curious what your approach is to viewing your different hardware offerings both in phone and with Surface, how you’re go-to-market may change around that and also since you decided to make the operating system for sub 9-inch devices free, how you see the value proposition and your ability to monetize that user base evolving over time?

Yes. The statement I made about bringing together our productivity applications across work and life is to really reflect the notion of dual use because when I think about productivity it doesn’t separate out what I use as a tool for communication with my family and what I use to collaborate at work. So that’s why having this one team that thinks about outlook.com as well as Exchange helps us think about those dual use. Same thing with files and OneDrive and OneDrive for business because we want to have the software have the smart about separating out the state carrying about IT control and data protection while me as an end user get to have the experiences that I want. That’s how we are thinking about harmonizing those digital life and work experiences.

On the hardware side, we would continue to build hardware that fits with these experiences if I understand your question right, which is how will be differentiate our first party hardware, we will build first party hardware that’s creating category, a good example is what we have done with Surface Pro 3. And in other places where we have really changed the Windows business model to encourage a plethora of OEMs to build great hardware and we are seeing that in fact in this holiday season, I think you will see a lot of value notebooks, you will see clamshells. So we will have the full price range of our hardware offering enabled by this new windows business model.

And I think the last part was how will we monetize? Of course, we will again have a combination, we will have our OEM monetization and some of these new business models are about monetizing on the backend with Bing integration as well as our services attached and that’s the reason fundamentally why we have these zero-priced Windows SKUs today.

Day two of the Microsoft Build developer conference in San Francisco wrapped up with the company announcing 44 new services. Most of those are based on Microsoft Azure – it’s cloud computing platform that manages applications across data centers. CCTV’s Mark Niu reports from San Francisco.

Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow in the Windows Azure Group at Microsoft working on Microsoft’s cloud platform. He is a widely recognized expert in operating systems, distributed systems, and cybersecurity. In this keynote from #ChefConf 2014, he gives an overview of Microsoft Azure and a demonstration of the integration between Azure and Chef

Then here is a fast talk and Q&A on Azure with Scott Guthrie after his keynote preseantation at BUILD 2014:Cloud Cover Live – Ask the Gu! [jlongo62 YouTube channel, published on April 21, 2014]

With Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group

2. Microsoft Azure Momentum on the Market

The day began with Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, touting Microsoft progress with Azure for the last 18 months when:

… we talked about our new strategy with Azure and our new approach, a strategy that enables me to use both infrastructure as a service and platform as a service capabilities together, a strategy that enables developers to use the best of the Windows ecosystem and the best of the Linux ecosystemtogether, and one that delivers unparalleled developer productivity and enables you to build great applications and services that work with every device …

Last year … shipped more than 300 significant new features and releases

… we’ve also been hard at work expanding the footprint of Azure around the world. The green circles you see on the slide here represent Azure regions, which are clusters of datacenters close together, and where you can go ahead and run your application code. Just last week, we opened two new regions, one in Shanghai and one in Beijing. Today, we’re the only global, major cloud provider that operates in mainland China. And by the end of the year, we’ll have more than 16 public regions available around the world, enabling you to run your applications closer to your customers than ever before.

More than 57 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are now deployed on Azure.

Customers run more than 250,000 public-facing websites on Azure, and we now host more than 1 million SQL databases on Azure.

More than 20 trillion objects are now stored in the Azure storage system. We have more than 300 million users, many of them — most of them, actually, enterprise users, registered with Azure Active Directory, and we process now more than 13 billion authentications per week.

We have now more than 1 million developers registered with our Visual Studio Online service, which is a new service we launched just last November.

Let’s go beyond the big numbers, though, and look at some of the great experiences that have recently launched and are using the full power of Azure and the cloud.

“Titanfall” was one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the year, and had a very successful launch a few weeks ago. “Titanfall” delivers an unparalleled multiplayer gaming experience, powered using Azure.

Let’s see a video of it in action, and hear what the developers who built it have to say.

‘Developers from Respawn Studios and Xbox discuss how cloud computing helps take Titanfall to the next level.

One of the key bets the developers of “Titanfall” made was for all game sessions on the cloud. In fact, you can’t play the game without the cloud, and that bet really paid off.

As you heard in the video, it enables much, much richer gaming experiences. Much richer AI experiences. And the ability to tune and adapt the game as more users use it.

To give you a taste of the scale, “Titanfall” had more than 100,000 virtual machines deployed and running on Azure on launch day. Which is sort of an unparalleled size in terms of a game launch experience, and the reviews of the game have been absolutely phenomenal.

Another amazing experience that recently launched and was powered using Azure was the Sochi Olympics delivered by NBC Sports.

NBC used Azure to stream all of the games both live and on demand to both Web and mobile devices. This was the first large-scale live event that was delivered entirely in the cloud with all of the streaming and encoding happening using Azure.

Traditionally, with live encoding, you typically run in an on-premises environment because it’s so latency dependent. With the Sochi Olympics, Azure enabled NBC to not only live encode in the cloud, but also do it across multiple Azure regions to deliver high-availability redundancy.

More than 100 million people watched the online experience, and more than 2.1 million viewers alone watched it concurrently during the U.S. versus Canada men’s hockey match, a new world record for online HD streaming.… RICK CORDELLA [Senior Vice President and General Manager of NBC Sports Digital]: The company bets about $1 billion on the Olympics each time it goes off. And we have 17 days to recoup that investment. Needless to say, there is no safety net when it comes to putting this content out there for America to enjoy. We need to make sure that content is out there, that it’s quality, that our advertisers and advertisements are being delivered to it. There really is no going back if something goes wrong.…

The following post is from Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft.

On Thursday at Build in San Francisco, we took an important step by unveiling a first-of-its kind cloud environment within Microsoft Azure that provides a fully integrated cloud experience – bringing together cross-platform technologies, services and tools that enable developers and businesses to innovate with enterprise-grade scalability at startup speed. Announced today, our new Microsoft Azure Preview [Management]Portal is an important step forward in delivering our promise of the cloud without complexity.

When cloud computing was born, it was hailed as the solution that developers and business had been waiting for – the promise of a quick and easy way to get more from your business-critical apps without the hassle and cost of infrastructure. But as the industry transitions toward mobile-first, cloud-first business models and scenarios, the promise of “quick and easy” is now at stake. There’s no question that developing for a world that is both mobile-first and cloud-first is complicated. Developers are managing thousands of virtual machines, cobbling together management and automation solutions, and working in unfamiliar environments just to make their apps work in the cloud – driving down productivity as a result.

Many cloud vendors tout the ease and cost savings of the cloud, but they leave customers without the tools or capabilities to navigate the complex realities of cloud computing. That’s why today we are continuing down a path of rapid innovation. In addition to our groundbreaking new Microsoft Azure Preview [Management] Portal, we announced several enhancements our customers need to fully tap into the power of the cloud. These include:

In addition, the company announced several new milestones in Visual Studio Online and .NET that give developers access to the most complete platform and tools for building in the cloud. Thursday’s announcements are part of Microsoft’s broader vision to erase the boundaries of cloud development and operational management for customers.

“Developing for a mobile-first, cloud-first world is complicated, and Microsoft is working to simplify this world without sacrificing speed, choice, cost or quality,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president at Microsoft. “Imagine a world where infrastructure and platform services blend together in one seamless experience, so developers and IT professionals no longer have to work in disparate environments in the cloud. Microsoft has been rapidly innovating to solve this problem, and we have taken a big step toward that vision today.”

One simplified cloud experience

The new Microsoft Azure Preview [Management] Portal provides a fully integrated experience that will enable customers to develop and manage an application in one place, using the platform and tools of their choice. The new portal combines all the components of a cloud application into a single development and management experience. New components include the following:

Simplified Resource Management. Rather than managing standalone resources such as Microsoft Azure Web Sites, Visual Studio Projects or databases, customers can now create, manage and analyze their entire application as a single resource group in a unified, customized experience, greatly reducing complexity while enabling scale. Today, the new Azure Manager is also being released through the latest Azure SDK for customers to automate their deployment and management from any client or device.

Integrated billing. A new integrated billing experience enables developers and IT pros to take control of their costs and optimize their resources for maximum business advantage.

Gallery. A rich gallery of application and services from Microsoft and the open source community, this integrated marketplace of free and paid services enables customers to leverage the ecosystem to be more agile and productive.

Visual Studio Online. Microsoft announced key enhancements through the Microsoft Azure Preview [Management] Portal, available Thursday. This includes Team Projects supporting greater agility for application lifecycle management and the lightweight editor code-named “Monaco” for modifying and committing Web project code changes without leaving Azure. Also included is Application Insights, an analytics solution that collects telemetry data such as availability, performance and usage information to track an application’s health. Visual Studio integration enables developers to surface this data from new applications with a single click.

…

Building an open cloud ecosystem

Showcasing Microsoft’s commitment to choice and flexibility, the company announced new open source partnerships with Chef and Puppet Labs to run configuration management technologies in Azure Virtual Machines. Using these community-driven technologies, customers will now be able to more easily deploy and configure in the cloud. In addition, today Microsoft announced the release of Java Applications to Microsoft Azure Web Sites, giving Microsoft even broader support for Web applications.

…. Bill Staples then came on stage to show off the new Azure [management] portal design and features. Bill walked through a number of the new innovations in the portal, such as improved UX, app insights, “blade” views [the “blade” term is used for the dropdown that allows a drilldown], etc. A screen shot of the new portal is shown below.

Bill also walked through the comprehensive analytics (such as compute and billing) that are now available on the portal. He also walked through “Application Insights,” which is a great way to instrument your code in both the portal and in your code with easy-to-use, pre-defined code snippets. He completed his demo walkthrough by showing the Azure [management] portal as a “NOC” [Network Operations Center] view on a big-screen TV.

BILL STAPLES at [1:43:39]: Now, to conclude the operations part of this demo, I wanted to show you an experience for how the new Azure Portal works on a different device. You’ve seen it on the desktop, but it works equally well on a tablet device, that is really touch friendly. Check it out on your Surface or your iPad, it works great on both devices.

But we’re thinking as well if you’ve got a big-screen TV or a projector lying around your team room, you might want to think about putting the Microsoft Azure portal as your own personal NOC.

In this case, I’ve asked the Office developer team if we could have access to their live site log. So they made me promise, do not hit the stop button or the delete button, which I promised to do.

[1:44:24]This is actually theOffice developer log site. And you can see it’s got almost 10 million hits already today running on Azure Websites. So very high traffic.

They’ve customized it to show off the browser usage on their website. Imagine we’re in a team Scrum with the Office developer guys and we check out, you know, how is the website doing? We’ve got some interesting trends here.

In fact, there was a spike of sessions it looks like going on about a week ago. And page views, that’s kind of a small part. It would be nice to know which page it was that spiked a week ago. Let’s go ahead and customize that.

This screen is kind of special because it has touch screen. So I can go ahead and let’s make that automatically expand there. Now we see a bigger view. Wow, that was a really big spike last week. What page was that? We can click into it. We get the full navigation experience, same on the desktop, as well as, oh, look at that. There’s a really popular blog post that happened about a week ago. What was that? Something about announcing Office on the iPad you love. Makes sense, huh? So we can see the Azure Portal in action here as the Office developer team might imagine it.[1:45:44]

The last thing I want to show is the Azure Gallery.

We populated the gallery with all of the first-party Microsoft Azure services, as well as the [services from] great partners that we’ve worked with so far in creating this gallery.

And what you’re seeing right here is just the beginning. We’ve got the core set of DevOps experiences built out, as well as websites, SQL, and MySQL support. But over the coming months, we’ll be integrating all of the developer and IT services in Microsoft as well as the partner services into this experience.

Let me just conclude by reminding us what we’ve seen. We’ve seen a first-of-its-kind experience from Microsoft that fuses our world-class developer services together with Azure to provide an amazing dev-ops experience where you can enjoy the entire lifecycle from development, deployment, operations, gathering analytics, and iterating right here in one experience.

We’ve seen an application-centric experience that brings together all the dev platform and infrastructure services you know and love into one common shell. And we’ve seen a new application model that you can describe declaratively. And through the command line or programmatically, build out services in the cloud with tremendous ease. [1:47:12]

Today, at Build, we unveiled a new Azure [Management] Portal experience we are building. I want to give you some insights into the work that VS Online team is doing to help with it. I’m not on the Azure team and am no expert on how they’d like to describe to the world, so please take any comments I make here about the new Azure portal as my perspective on it and not necessarily an official one.

Bill Staples first presented to me almost a year ago an idea of creating a new portal experience for Azure designed to be an optimal experience for DevOps. It would provide everything a DevOps team needs to do modern cloud based development. Capabilities to provision dev and test resources, development and collaboration capabilities, build, release and deployment capabilities, application telemetry and management capabilities and more. Pretty quickly it became clear to me that if we could do it, it would be awesome. An incredibly productive and easy way for devs to do soup to nuts app development.

What we demoed today (and made available via http://portal.azure.com”) is the first incarnation of that. My team (the VS Online Team) has worked very hard over the past many months with the Azure team to build the beginnings of the experience we hope to bring to you. It’s very early and it’s nowhere near done but it’s definitely something we’d love to start getting some feedback on.

For now, it’s limited to Azure websites, SQL databases and a subset of the VS Online capabilities. If you are a VS Online/TFS user, think of this as a companion to Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online and all of the tools you are used to. When you create a team project in the Azure portal, it’s a VS Online Team Project like any other and is accessible from the Azure portal, the VS Online web UI, Visual Studio, Eclipse and all the other ways your Visual Studio Online assets are available. For now, though, there are a few limitations – which we are working hard to address. We are in the middle of adding Azure Active Directory support to Visual Studio Online and, for a variety of reasons, chose to limit the new portal to only work with VS Online accounts linked to Azure Active Directory.

The best way to ensure this is just to create a new Team Project and a new VS Online account from within the new Azure portal. You will need to be logged in to the Azure portal with an identity known to your Azure Active Directory tenant and to add new users, rather than add them directly in Visual Studio Online, you will add them through Azure Active directory. One of the ramifications of this, for now, is that you can’t use an existing VS Online account in the new portal – you must create a new one. Clearly that’s a big limitation and one we are working hard to remove. We will enable you to link existing VS Online accounts to Active Directory we just don’t have it yet – stay tuned.

Brian Keller talks with Jonah Sterling and Vishal Joshi about the new Microsoft Azure portal preview. This Preview portal is a big step forward in the journey toward integrated DevOps tools, technologies, and cloud services. See how you can deliver and scale business-ready apps for every platform more easily and rapidly—using what you already know and whatever toolset you like most

4. New Azure features: IaaS, web, mobile and data announcements

[IaaS] First up, let’s look at some of the improvements we’re making with our infrastructure features and some of the great things we’re enabling with virtual machines.

Azure enables you to run both Windows and Linuxvirtual machines in the cloud. You can run them as stand-alone servers, or join them together to a virtual network, including one that you can optionally bridge to an on-premises networking environment.

This week, we’re making it even easier for developers to create and manage virtual machines in Visual Studio without having to leave the VS IDE: You can now create, destroy, manage and debug any number of VMs in the cloud. (Applause.)

Prior to today, it was possible to create reusable VM image templates, but you had to write scripts and manually attach things like storage drives to them. Today, we’re releasing support that makes it super-easy to capture images that can contain any number of storage drives. Once you have this image, you can then very easily take it and create any number of VM instances from it, really fast, and really easy. (Applause.)

Starting today, you can also now easily configure VM images using popular frameworks like Puppet, Chef, and our own PowerShell and VSD tools. These tools enable you to avoid having to create and manage lots of separate VM images. Instead, you can define common settings and functionality using modules that can cut across every type of VM you use.

You can also create modules that define role-specific behavior, and all these modules can be checked into source control and they can also then be deployed to a Puppet Master or Chef server.

And one of the things we’re doing this week is making it incredibly easy within Azure to basically spin up a server farm and be able to automatically deploy, provision and manage all of these machines using these popular tools.

…

We’re also excited to announce the general availability of our auto-scale service, as well as a bunch of great virtual networking capabilities including point-to-site VPN support going GA, new dynamic routing, subnet migration, as well as static internal IP address. And we think the combination of this really gives you a very flexible environment, as you saw, a very open environment, and lets you run pretty much any Windows or Linux workload in the cloud.

So we think infrastructure as a service is super-flexible, and it really kind of enables you to manage your environments however you want.

We also, though, provide prebuilt services and runtime environments that you can use to assemble your applications as well, and we call these platform as a service [PaaS] capabilities.

One of the benefits of these prebuilt services is that they enable you to focus on your application and not have to worry about the infrastructure underneath it.

We handle patching, load balancing, high availability and auto scale for you. And this enables you to work faster and do more.

What I want to do is just spend a little bit of time talking through some of these platform as a service capabilities, so we’re going to start talking about our Web functionality here today.

[Web] One of the most popular PaaS services that we now have on Windows Azure is something we call the Azure Website Service. This enables you to very easily deploy Web applications written in a variety of different languages and host them in the cloud. We support .NET, NOJS, PHP, Python, and we’re excited this week to also announce that we’re adding Java language support as well.

This enables you as a developer to basically push any type of application into Azure into our runtime environment, and basically host it to any number of users in the cloud.

Couple of the great features we have with Azure include auto-scale capability. What this means is you can start off running your application, for example, in a single VM. As more load increases to it, we can then automatically scale up multiple VMs for you without you having to write any script or take any action yourself. And if you get a lot of load, we can scale up even more.

You can basically configure how many VMs you maximally want to use, as well as what the burn-down rate is. And as your traffic — and this is great because it enables you to not only handle large traffic spikes and make sure that your apps are always responsive, but the nice thing about auto scale is that when the traffic drops off, or maybe during the night when it’s a little bit less, we can automatically scale down the number of machines that you need, which means that you end up saving money and not having to pay as much.

One of the really cool features that we’ve recently introduced with websites is something we call our staging support. This solves kind of a pretty common problem with any Web app today, which is there’s always someone hitting it. And how do you stage the deployments of new code that you roll out so that you don’t ever have a site in an intermediate state and that you can actually deploy with confidence at any point in the day?

And what staging support enables inside of Azure is for you to create a new staging version of your Web app with a private URL that you can access and use to test. And this allows you to basically deploy your application to the staging environment, get it ready, test it out before you finally send users to it, and then basically you can push one button or send a single command called swap where we’ll basically rotate the incoming traffic from the old production site to the new staged version.

What’s nice is we still keep your old version around. So if you discover once you go live you still have a bug that you missed, you can always swap back to the previous state. Again, this allows you to deploy with a lot of confidence and make sure that your users are always seeing a consistent experience when they hit your app.

Another cool feature that we’ve recently introduced is a feature we call Web Jobs. And this enables you to run background tasks that are non-HTTP responsive that you can actually run in the background. So if it takes a while to run it, this is a great way you can offload that work so that you’re not stalling your actual request response thread pool.

Basically, you know, common scenario we see for a lot of people is if they want to process something in the background, when someone submits something, for example, to the website, they can go ahead and simply drop an item into a queue or into the storage account, respond back down to the user, and then with one of these Web jobs, you can very easily run background code that can pull that queue message and actually process it in an offline way.

And what’s nice about Web jobs is you can run them now in the same virtual machines that host your websites. What that means is you don’t have to spin up your own separate set of virtual machines, and again, enables you to save money and provides a really nice management experience for it.

The last cool feature that we’ve recently introduced is something we call traffic manager support. With Traffic Manager, you can take advantage of the fact that Azure runs around the world, and you can spin up multiple instances of your website in multiple different regions around the world with Azure.

What you can then do is use Traffic Manager so you can have a single DNS entry that you then map to the different instances around the world. And what Traffic Manager does is gives you a really nice way that you can actually automatically, for example, route all your North America users to one of the North American versions of your app, while people in Europe will go routed to the European version of your app. That gives you better performance, response and latency.

Traffic Manager is also smart enough so that if you ever have an issue with one of the instances of your app, it can automatically remove it from those rotations and send users to one of the other active apps within the system. So this gives you also a nice way you can fail over in the event of an outage.

And the great thing about Traffic Manager, now, is you can use it not just for virtual machines and cloud services, but we’ve also now enabled it to work fully with websites.

…

[From BUILD Day 2: Keynote Summary [by Steve Fox [MSFT] on MSDN Blogs, April 3, 2014]] Scott then invited Mads Kristensen on stage to walk through a few of the features that Scott discussed at a higher level. Specifically, he walked through the new ASP.NET templates emphasizing the creation of the DB layer and then showing PowerShell integration to manage your web site. He then showed Angular integration with Azure Web sites, emphasizing easy and dynamic ways to update your site showing deep browser and Visual Studio integration (Browser Link), showing updates that are made in the browser show up in the code in Visual Studio. Very cool!!

He also showed how you can manage staging and production sites by using the “swap” functionality built into the Azure Web sites service. He also showed Web Jobs to show how you can also run background jobs and Traffic Manager functionality to ensure your customers have the best performing web site in their regions.

So as Mads showed, there are a lot of great features that we’re kind of unveiling this week. A lot of great announcements that go with it.

These include the general availability release of auto-scale support for websites, as well as the general availability release of our new Traffic Manager support for websites as well. As you saw there, we also have Web Job support, and one of the things that we didn’t get to demo which is also very cool is backup support so that automatically we can have both your content as well as your databases backed up when you run them in our Websites environment as well.

Lots of great improvements also coming in terms of from an offer perspective. One thing a lot of people have asked us for with Websites is the ability not only to use SSL, but to use SSL without having to pay for it. So one of the cool things that we’re adding with Websites and it goes live today is we’re including one IP address-based SSL certificate and five SNI-based SSL certificates at no additional cost to every Website instance. (Applause.)

Throughout the event here, you’re also going to hear a bunch of great sessions on some of the improvements we’re making to ASP.NET. In terms of from a Web framework perspective, we’ve got general availability release of ASP.NET MVC 5.1, Web API 2.1, Identity 2.0, as well as Web Pages 3.1 So a lot of great, new features to take advantage of.

As you saw Mads demo, a lot of great features inside Visual Studio including the ability every time you create an ASP.NET project now to automatically create an Azure Website as part of that flow. Remember, every Azure customer gets 10 free Azure Websites that you can use forever. So even if you’re not an MSDN customer, you can take advantage of that feature in order to set up a Web environment literally every time you create a new project. So pretty exciting stuff.

So that was one example of some of the PaaS capabilities that we have inside Azure.

[Mobile] I’m going to move now into the mobile space and talk about some of the great improvements that we’re making there as well.

One of the great things about Azure is the fact that it makes it really easy for you to build back ends for your mobile applications and devices. And one of the cool things you can do now is you can develop those back ends with both .NET as well as NOJS, and you can use Visual Studio or any other text editor on any other operating system to actually deploy those applications into Azure.

And once they’re deployed, we make it really easy for you to go ahead and connect them to any type of device out there in the world.

Now, some of the great things you can do with this is take advantage of some of the features that we have, which provide very flexible data handling. So we have built-in support for Azure storage, as well as our SQL database, which is our PaaS database offering for relational databases, as well as take advantage of things like MongoDB and other popular NoSQL solutions.

We support the ability not only to reply to messages that come to us, but also to push messages to devices as well. One of the cool features that Mobile Services can take advantage of — and it’s also available as a stand-alone feature — is something we call notification hubs. And this basically allows you to send a single message to a notification hub and then broadcast it to, in some cases, devices that might be registered to it.

We also support with Mobile Services a variety of flexible authentication options. So when we first launched mobile services, we added support for things like Facebook login, Google ID, Twitter ID, as well as Microsoft Accounts.

One of the things we’re excited to demo here today is Active Directory support as well. So this enables you to build new applications that you can target, for example, your employees or partners, to enable them to sign in using the same enterprise credentials that they use in an on-premises Active Directory environment.

What’s great is we’re using standard OAuth tokens as part of that. So once you authenticate, you can take that token, you can use it to also provide authorization access to your own custom back-end logic or data stores that you host inside Azure.

We’re also making it really easy so that you can also take that same token and you can use it to access Office 365 APIs and be able to integrate that user’s data as well as functionality inside your application as well.

The beauty about all of this is it works with any device. So whether it’s a Windows device or an iOS device or an Android device, you can go ahead and take advantage of this capability.

…

[From BUILD Day 2: Keynote Summary [by Steve Fox [MSFT] on MSDN Blogs, April 3, 2014]]Yavor Georgiev then came on stage to walk through a Mobile Services demo. He showed off a new Mobile Services Visual Studio template, test pages with API docs, local and remote debugging capabilities, and a LOB app that enables Facilities departments to manage service requests—this showed off a lot of the core ASP.NET/MVC features along with a quick publish service to your Mobile Services service in Azure. Through this app, he showed how to use Active Directory to build the app—which prompts you to log into the app with your corp/AD credentials to use the app. He then showed how the app integrates with SharePoint/O365 such that the request leverages the SharePoint REST APIs to publish a doc to a Facilities doc repository. He also showed how you can re-use the core code through Xamarin to repurpose the code for iOS.

The app is shown here native in Visual Studio.

This app view is the cross-platform build using Xamarin.

Kudos to Yavor! This was an awesome demo that showcases how far Mobile Services has come in a short period of time—love the extensibility and the cross-platform capabilities. Very nice!

One of the things that kind of Yavor showed there is just sort of how easy it is now to build enterprise-grade mobile applications using Azure and Visual Studio.

And one of the key kind of lynchpins in terms of from a technology standpoint that really makes this possible is our Azure Active Directory Service. This basically provides an Active Directory in the cloud that you can use to authenticate any device. What makes it powerful is the fact that you can synchronize it with your existing on-premises Active Directory. And we support both synch options, including back to Windows Server 2003 instances, so it doesn’t even require a relatively new Windows Server, it works with anything you’ve got.

We also support a federate option as well if you want to use ADFS. Once you set that environment up, then all your users are available to be authenticated in the cloud and what’s great is we ship SDKs that work with all different types of devices, and enables you to integrate authentication into those applications. And so you don’t everyone have to have your back end hosted on Azure, you can take advantage of this capability to enable single sign-on with any enterprise credential.

And what’s great is once you get that token, that same token can then be used to program against Office 365 APIs as well as the other services across Microsoft. So this provides a really great opportunity not only for building enterprise line-of-business apps, but also for ISVs that want to be able to build SaaS solutions as well as mobile device apps that integrate and target enterprise customers as well.

…

[From BUILD Day 2: Keynote Summary [by Steve Fox [MSFT] on MSDN Blogs, April 3, 2014]]Scott then invited Grant Peterson from DocuSign on stage to discuss how they are using Azure, who demoed AD integration with DocuSign’s iOS app. Nice!

This is really huge for those of you building apps that are cross-platform but have big investments in AD and also provides you as developers a way to reach enterprise audiences.

So I think one of the things that’s pretty cool about that scenario is both the opportunity it offers every developer that wants to reach an enterprise audience. The great thing is all of those 300 million users that are in Azure Active Directory today and the millions of enterprises that have already federated with it are now available for you to build both mobile and Web applications against and be able to offer to them an enterprise-grade solution to all of your ISV-based applications.

That really kind of changes one of the biggest concerns that people end up having with enterprise apps with SaaS into a real asset where you can make it super-easy for them to go ahead and integrate and be able to do it from any device.

And one of the things you might have noticed there in the code that Grant showed was that it was actually all done on the client using Objective-C, and that’s because we have a new Azure Active Directory iOS SDK as well as an Android SDK in addition to our Windows SDK. And so you can use and integrate with Azure Active Directory from any device, any language, any tool.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the great mobile announcements that we’re making today. Yavor showed we now have .NET backend support, single sign-on with Active Directory.

One of the features we didn’t get a chance to show, but you can learn more about in the breakout talk is offline data sync. So we also now have built into Mobile Services the ability to sync and handle disconnected states with data. And then, obviously, the Visual Studio and remote debugging capabilities as well.

We’ve got not only the Azure SDKs for Azure Active Directory, but we also now have Office 365 API integration. We’re also really excited to announce the general availability or our Azure AD Premium release. This provides enterprises management capabilities that they can actually also use and integrate with your applications, and enables IT to also feel like they can trust the applications and the SaaS solutions that their users are using.

And then we have a bunch of great improvements with notification hubs including Kindle support as well as Visual Studio integration.

So a lot of great features. You can learn about all of them in the breakout talks this week.

So we’ve talked about Web, we’ve talked about mobile when we talk about PaaS.

[Data] I want to switch gears now and talk a little bit about data, which is pretty fundamental and integral to building any type of application.

And with Azure, we support a variety of rich ways to handle data ranging from unstructured, semistructured, to relational. One of the most popular services you heard me talk about at the beginning of the talk is our SQL database story. We’ve got over a million SQL databases now hosted on Azure. And it’s a really easy way for you to spin up a database, and better yet, it’s a way that we then manage for you. So we do handle things like high availability and patching.

You don’t have to worry about that. Instead, you can focus on your application and really be productive.

We’ve got a whole bunch of great SQL improvements that we’re excited to announce this week. I’m going to walk through a couple of them real quickly.

One of them is we’re increasing the database size that we support with SQL databases. Previously, we only supported up to 150 gigs. We’re excited to announce that we’re increasing that to support 500 gigabytes going forward. And we’re also delivering a new 99.95 percent SLA as part of that. So this now enables you to run even bigger applications and be able to do it with high confidence in the cloud. (Applause.)

Another cool feature we’re adding is something we call Self-Service Restore. I don’t know if you ever worked on a database application where you’ve written code like this, hit go, and then suddenly had a very bad feeling because you realized you omitted the where clause and you just deleted your entire table. (Laughter.)

And sometimes you can go and hopefully you have backups. This is usually the point when you discover when you don’t have backups.

And one of the things that we built in as part of the Self-Service Restore feature is automatic backups for you. And we actually let you literally roll back the clock, and you can choose what time of the day you want to roll it back to. We save up to I think 31 days of backups. And you can basically rehydrate a new database based on whatever time of the day you wanted to actually restore from. And then, hopefully, your life ends up being a lot better than it started out.

This is just a built-in feature. You don’t have to turn it on. It’s just sort of built in, something you can take advantage of. (Applause.)

Another great feature that we’re building in is something we call active geo-replication. What this lets you do now is you can actually go ahead and run SQL databases in multiple Azure regions around the world. And you can set it up to automatically replicate your databases for you.

And this is basically an asynchronous replication. You can basically have your primary in rewrite mode, and then you can actually have your secondary and you can have multiple secondaries in read-only mode. So you can still actually be accessing the data in read-only mode elsewhere.

In the event that you have a catastrophic issue in, say, one region, say a natural disaster hits, you can go ahead and you can initiate the failover automatically to one of your secondary regions. This basically allows you to continue moving on without having to worry about data loss and gives you kind of a really nice, high-availability solution that you can take advantage of.

One of the things that’s nice about Azure’s regions is we try to make sure we have multiple regions in each geography. So, for example, we have two regions that are at least 500 miles away in Europe, and in North America, and similarly with Australia, Japan and China. And what that means is that you know if you do need to fail over, your data is never leaving the geo-political area that it’s based in. And if you’re hosted in Europe, you don’t have to worry about your data ever leaving Europe, similarly for the other geo-political entities that are out there.

So this gives you a way now with high confidence that you can store your data and know that you can fail over at any point in time.

In addition to some of these improvements with SQL databases, we also have a host of great improvements coming with HDInsight, which is our big data analytics engine. This runs standard Hadoop instance and runs it as a managed service, so we do all the patching and management for you.

We’re excited to announce the GA of Hadoop 2.2 support. We also have now .NET 4.5 installed and APIs available so you can now write your MapReduce jobs using .NET 4.5.

We’re also adding audit and operation history support, a bunch of great improvements with Hive, and we’re now Yarn-enabling the cluster so you can actually run more software on it as well.

And we’re also excited to announce a bunch of improvements in the storage space, including the general availability of our read-access geo-redundant storage option.

So we’ve kind of done a whole bunch of kind of deep dives into a whole bunch of the Azure features.

… With the April updates to Microsoft Azure, Azure Web Sites offers a new pricing tier called Basic. The Basic pricing tier is designated for production sites, supporting smaller sites, as well as development and testing scenarios. … Which pricing tier is right for me? … The new pricing tier is a great benefit to many customers, offering some high-end features at a reasonable cost. We hope this new offering will enable a better deployment for all of you.

Microsoft is launching support for Java-based web sites on Azure Web Sites. This capability is intended to satisfy many common Java scenarios combined with the manageability and easy scaling options from Azure Web Sites. …The addition of Java is available immediately on all tiers for no additional cost. It offers new possibilities to host your pre-existing Java web applications. New Java web site development on Azure is easy using the Java Azure SDK which provides integration with Azure services.

With the latest release of Azure Web Sites and the new Azure Portal Preview we are introducing a new concept: Web Hosting Plans. A Web Hosting Plan (WHP) allows you to group and scale sites independently within a subscription.…

The load balancing services can be accessed by specifying input endpoints on your services either via the Microsoft Azure Portal or via the service model of your application. Once a hosted service with one or more input endpoints is deployed in Microsoft Azure, it automatically configures the load balancing services offered by Microsoft Azure platform. To get the benefit of resiliency / redundancy of your services, you need to have at least two virtual machines serving the same endpoint.

The web marches on, and so does Visual Studio and ASP.NET, with a renewed commitment to making a great IDE for web developers of all kinds. Join Scott & Scott for this dive into VS2013 Update 2 and beyond. We’ll see new features in ASP.NET, new ideas in front end web development, as well as a peek into ASP.NET’s future.

New tiers improve customer experience and provide more business continuity options

To better serve your needs for more flexibility, Microsoft Azure SQL Database is adding new service tiers, Basic and Standard, to work alongside its Premium tier, which is currently in preview. Together these service tiers will help you more easily support the needs of database workloads and application patterns built on Microsoft Azure. … Previews for all three tiers are available today.

The Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers are designed to deliver more predictable performance for light-weight to heavy-weight transactional application demands. Additionally, the new tiers offer a spectrum of business continuity features, a [Data] stronger uptime SLA at 99.95%, and larger database sizes up to 500 GB for less cost. The new tiers will also help remove costly workarounds and offer an improved billing experience for you.

Azure HDInsight now supports [Data] Hadoop 2.2 with HDInsight cluster version 3.0 and takes full advantage of these platform to provide a range of significant benefits to customers. These include, most notably:

Microsoft Avro Library: …

[Data] YARN: A new, general-purpose, distributed, application management framework that has replaced the classic Apache Hadoop MapReduce framework for processing data in Hadoop clusters. It effectively serves as the Hadoop operating system, and takes Hadoop from a single-use data platform for batch processing to a multi-use platform that enables batch, interactive, online and stream processing. This new management framework improves scalability and cluster utilization according to criteria such as capacity guarantees, fairness, and service-level agreements.

High Availability: …

[Data] Hive performance: Order of magnitude improvements to Hive query response times (up to 40x) and to data compression (up to 80%) using the Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) format.

As a teaser Q: [6:43] How do you think about consumer and business, and how do you see them benefiting each other?

A: You know, one of the things that when we think about ourproduct innovation, we necessarily don’t compartementalize by consumer and business, we think about the user. In many of these cases, what needs to happen is experiences. That’s for sure have to have a strong notion of identity and security, so I.T. control, where it’s needed, still matters a lot, and that’s something that, again, we will uniquely bring to market. But it starts with the user. The user obviously is going to have a life at home and a life at work. So how do we bridge that as there more and more of what they do is digitally mediated? I want to be able to connect with my friends and family. I also want to be able to participate in the social network at work, and I don’t want the two things to be confused, but I don’t want to pick three different tools for doing the one thing I want to do seamlessly across my work and life. That’s what we are centered on. When we think about what we are doing in communications, what we are doing in productivity or social communications, those are all the places where we really want to bridge the consumer and business market, because that’s how we believe end-users actually work. [8:01]

We’ve positioned the animation to tell a story that will appeal to non-technical customers (i.e. the business decision makers) that will augment the product and technical stories we have developed. Think of it as an opening gambit to the kind of conversation we want to have with them. This is a “people story” about modern apps for business. This animation is aimed at taking the business angle and reinforcing our strong business app story. Learn More: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/modern-business-apps.aspx

My name is Gavriella Schuster and I’m the general manager at the US server and cloud business. Today I’d like to talk to you about Microsoft’s vision of the unified platform for modern businesses and how—what we call the Cloud OS—can help you transform your business as you shift in a world demanding continuous, always on services at broad-scale accessed by a multitude of devices.

You are in the center of one of the largest IT transformations this industry have ever seen. No question what the big shifts are happening in IT today due to the strength mobility and devices, applications, Big Data and Cloud.

The proliferation of devices and the integration of technology has changed the way people live and work, and it opened the door for a multitude of new applications designed to meet every need. These applications are social, their mobile and they need to be scaleable which means many will have a cloud back-end.

These devices and applications produce a huge amount of data. In fact, the world of data is doubling every two to three years. More than ninety percent of the world’s data was developed just in the last couple of years. These trends are forcing IT to answer new and different question.

How can you enable a mobile workforce work from anywhere on any device? How can you involve your applications to meet these new demand? How can you help businesses make faster and better decision? And, how do you ensure your infrastructure can and will scale to meet the demand?

Microsoft answer is the Cloud OS. The Cloud OS is Microsoft hybrid cloud solution comprised of Windows Server, Windows Azure, System Center, Windows Intune, and SQL Server. With shared planning, development, engineering and support across these technologies we’re bringing a comprehensive solution to support your business across a number of fronts—from infrastructure to data, to applications and devices.

When it comes to mobility and devices we empower people centric IT. Our solutions enable you to deliver a consistent and great user experience from anywhere, no matter the device, with the way to manage and protect it all.

Nearly every customer echoes the importance of enabling a bring-your-own-device environment as a direct driver of productivity.

Aston Martin, for instance, the luxury car manufacturer was challenged managing over 700 remote devices—laptops, desktops, smartphones—across 145 dealerships in 41 countries. With Windows Intune in System Center Configuration Manager Aston Martin can now proactively manage these devices via a single cloud-based console, before employee productivity is affected. In any case where an employee’s device is stolen I can remotely wipe that device to protect your corporate data.

At the application level we enable modern business applications, so that you can quickly extend your applications with new capabilities and deploy on multiple devices, where your applications live, and move wherever you want.

In regards to data its all about Big Data, small data, and all data. The Cloud OS will help you unlock insights on any data, make it easier for everyone to access and perform analytics with tools they already use, like SharePoint an Excel, on any data, any size, from anywhere.

We have democratized access to this data so that the many not the few can uncover insights to power your business.

And lastly, at the core of the Cloud OS powering mobility applications and data is your infrastructure. Our goal is to help you transform your datacenter, to enable you to go from managing each server individually to enabling a single well-managed elastic and scaleable environment to power all your application compute, networking and storage needs.

We call this concept a datacenter without boundaries, where you get a consistent experience that takes you from the data center to the cloud and back if you wish, so that you have access to resources on-demand and the ability to move workloads around with maximum flexibility. This provides you with easy on, easy off with no cloud lock in.

What makes our Cloud OS vision different is this hybrid design at the core. You benefit from a common and consistent approach to development, management, identity, security, virtualization and data. Spending on premises to the cloud, your private cloud, a service provider cloud, and Windows Azure—Microsoft enterprise public cloud.

This is powerful for a number of reasons.

One, we deliver a flexible development environment to developers [that they] can code and deploy anywhere across Ruby, Java, PHP, Python or .NET. And, you get complete workload mobility to move these applications across cloud.

With System Center you get a single unified management solution to manage all your physical and virtual infrastructure resources across cloud in a single pane of glass.

Common identity is a third element of our consistent platform. With a federated Active Directory and multi-factor authentication you get a common identity across cloud, so your employees can enjoy a seamless, single sign-on experience.

Integrated virtualization is the fourth area. We go beyond traditional server virtualization where compute is virtualized and extended to other areas like storage and networking that are costly in your environment today.

Lasty being able to have a complete data platform, where your data can reside anywhere across these three clouds, is a value proposition that is huge as well. You can tap into it and all that data wherever you need, anytime.

Well I shared the core benefits Microsoft can deliver in this hybrid cloud approach.

One question I hear frequently from customers is: Oh, this is great. Can you tell me the best use case to get started with Azure?

Well, Azure can support a number of your infrastructure as a service [IaaS], and platform as a service [PaaS] needs. There are few simple areas I encourage you to look at first.

Let’s start with storage.

With today’s enormous growth in data everyone is looking for smarter, more cost-effective ways to manage and store their data. Windows Azure provides scaleable cloud storage and backup for any data big and small. Azure’s very cost-effective because you only pay for what you use at a cost that is lower than many on-premise solutions, SAN or NAS. Additionally we offer hybrid cloud storage option with our Store Simple appliance through Azure allowing you to access frequently use data locally and [put] tiered, less use data to the cloud. Your data is deduplicated, compressed and encrypted which means the data is smaller and therefore more cost effective to store and protect.

One customer example is Steelcase Corporation. There’re an office furniture supplier. They’ve backed up their SharePoint data with Store Simple on Azure, reducing their storage costs by 46 percent, and their restore times by 87 percent.

Another area to consider for Azure is your development and testing environment. You can easily and quickly self provision as many virtual machines as you need for your application development and testing in the cloud, without waiting for hardware procurement or internal processes. We offer complete virtual machine mobility so you can decide whether to deploy that application in production on Windows Azure, on-premises in your data center, or with a hosting provider. The choice is yours to deploy easily in whichever location with a few keystrokes.

And, if you’re looking to upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint or SQL [Server] Azure is a perfect option for testing in the cloud, with no impact to your production environment. You can roll out on-premises or in the cloud when you are ready.

On the topic of SQL [Server], backing up your on-premises SQL [Server] or Oracle databases is a must-have to help reduce your down time and minimize data loss. With Azure you can create a low-cost SQL Server 2012 or 2014 database replica without having to manage at separate data center or use expensive co-location facilities, offering you geo-redundancy and encryption.

Backing up your data base using Windows Azure Storage can save you up to 60 percent compared to on-premise SAN or tape solutions due to our compression technology.

And, our last scenario here for you to consider is identity. Managing identity across both the public cloud an on-premises applications provides you with the security you want in a great user experience. With Windows Azure Active Directory you can create new identities in the cloud or connect to an existing on-premises Active Directory to federate and manage access to your cloud application. More importantly you can synchronize on-premises identities with Windows Azure Active Directory and enable single sign-on for your users to access [your] cloud application.

I hope I provided you with a good overview of Microsoft hybrid cloud approach with the Cloud OS

In delivering global services at scale—like Bing, Skype and Xbox from our data centers—you can trust that our solutions are battle tested to meet the needs of your business.

And it’s not just battle tested by us but also by our customers. You heard a number of examples today of enterprises and organizations already benefiting from the Cloud OS vision. There are many-many more. This is a look at a small sampling.

We’re excited to see how each of you will transform IT and your businesses by taking advantage of our investments and solutions that are bringing the Cloud OS to life. So whether you’re testing the cloud for the first time, or going along with it, we have the platform and tools to help you every step of the way. Windows Azure in Windows Server support hybrid IT scenarios so you can flex to the cloud when you want, but still using your existing IT assets.

To get started today visit our Microsoft Cloud OS home page [Jan 20, 2014] to learn more and try out our solution.

1. Power BI as the lead business solution and the Microsoft’s visionary Data Platform solution built for it

Self-service business intelligence solution enables all kinds of business users to find relevant information, pull data from Windows Azure and other sources, and prepare business intelligence modelsfor analysis, visualization and collaboration.February 10: the top message on the Microsoft News Center

The following post is from Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President, Data Platform Group.

On Monday we announced that Power BI for Office 365 – our self-service business intelligence solution designed for everyone – is generally available. Power BI empowers all kinds of business users to find relevant information, pull data from Windows Azure and other sources, and prepare compelling business intelligence models for analysis, visualization, and collaboration.

Modernizing business intelligence

Today business intelligence is only used by a fraction of the people that could derive value from it. What we all need is modernized business intelligence which will help everyone get the information they need to understand their job or personal life better. Not just the type of information gained from an Internet search, but also information from expert sources. Now imagine you could bring together these different information sources, discover relationships between facets of information, create new insights and understand your world better. And that you could get others to see what you see, and enable them to collaborate and build on one another’s ideas. And imagine that available on any scale of data and any kinds of computation you might need. Now imagine it’s not just you – but that anyone can access this kind of data-driven discovery and learning.

Power BI brings together many key aspects of the modernization of business intelligence: a public and corporate catalog of data sets and BI models, a way to search for data, a modern app and a Web-first experience, rich interactive visualizations, collaboration capabilities, tools for IT to govern data and models, and a groundbreaking natural language experience for exploring insights. Together, these capabilities will not just change the kinds of insights we can gain from data, but change the reach of those insights as well.

Bringing big data to a billion users

With Power BI, we have the opportunity to bring these types of data insights to a billion people. Office 365 is broadly adopted and growing – one in four of our enterprise customers now has Office 365. By making our business intelligence features part of Office, we ensure the tools are accessible, and through Office 365, we make the tools easy to adopt – not just the ease of using Web applications, but making things like collaboration, security, data discovery and exploration integrated and turnkey.

I talked earlier about the importance of reach, and one of the ultimate forms of reach we discovered over the course of developing Power BI has been a feature we named Q&A, which allows anyone to type in search terms – just as they would in Bing – and get instantaneous, visual results in the form of interactive charts or graphs.

Power BI for Office 365: Self-service analytics for all your data. Learn how Power BI can help you discover, analyze and visualize your data while it empowers you to share your insights and collaborate with your colleagues. Ask questions with Q&A, schedule refreshes from on-prem or cloud data sources and access your reports anytime, anywhere. Try Power BI: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/default.aspx#fbid=lVtiyE9CkuC

Realizing value from data

I personally know how significant this all is – as you can imagine, at Microsoft we run our business on our own data platform and on Power BI. In my role as head of our data platform group, I don’t create a lot of models, but I consume a lot of them – everything from the business financials of the SQL Server business and team management to our engineering and services datasets. My mobile business intelligence application for Windows 8 allows me to interact with our daily engineering data. The ability to visualize and interact with data on my large PPI screen allows me and my finance and marketing partners to meet in my office and have a deep conversation about the business. Collaboration through Office 365 and SharePoint Online allows me to share perspective with my peers around the company.

Power BI for Office 365 has empowered me to realize deeper value from data. I’m excited to share this power with everyone.

I’m at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week – where the world’s leaders, thought leaders and innovators gather to discuss the political, social and economic forces that are transforming the world and our lives. The other force that the World Economic Forum calls out in their program (above all else) are the technological forces.

Education data from the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Index — visualized using Power BI for Office 365

Microsoft’s Vision Center sits directly across from the congress hall where all of these forces are being discussed and inside the center we’re showing how our technologies are helping turn data in to insight. As part of their work, the World Economic Forum produces a large volume of data and indices covering 148 countries. When I saw this data set in an Excel spreadsheet I knew it was ripe for transformation using Power BI for Office 365. As you can see in the video above, we’ve taken all of that data and are helping to deliver insight from it using Power View, Power Map and our Q&A technology. When you see health data below over a time period mapped country by country it really bring the data alive. When you can compare educational data across regions, countries and by type of education, once again the data comes alive. The real treat for me has been using Q&A to ask questions of the data much as you would ask questions of a data scientist.

Healthcare data from the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Index — visualized using Power BI for Office 365

If you’ve not had a chance to see Power BI in action I’d encourage you to take up a trial of Office 365 and download the Power BI tools from PowerBI.com – it puts the decision making from data in the hands of anyone and I believe will help to deliver insights that answer some of the big questions at Davos this week and in the future.

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365, a cloud-based business intelligence service that gives people a powerful new way to work with data in the tools they use every day, Excel and Office 365. Power BI for Office 365 brings together Microsoft’s strengths in cloud, productivity and business intelligence to enable people to easily analyze and visualize data in Excel, discover valuable insights, and share and collaborate on those insights from anywhere with Office 365.

Power BI for Office 365 with Excel allows business users to easily create reports and discover insights in Excel and share and collaborate on those insights in Office 365. Excel includes powerful data modeling and visualization capabilities which enables customer to easily discover, access, and combine their data. Customers also have the ability to create rich 3D geospatial visualizations in Excel.

With Office 365, customers have access to cloud-based capabilities to share visualizations and reports with their colleagues in real time and on mobile devices, interact with their data in new ways to gain faster insights and manage their work more effectively. These key cloud-based capabilities include:

A Data Management Gateway which enables IT to build connections to on-premise data sources and schedule refreshes. Business users always have the most up to date reports, whether on their desktop or over their device.

[From the preview in Oct’13 here:] Through the Data Management Gateway, IT can enable on-premises data access for all reports published into Power BI so that users have the latest data. IT can also enable enterprise data search across their organization, making it easier for users to discover the data they need. The system also monitors data usage across the organization, providing IT with the information they need to understand manage the system overall.

[Power] BI Sites, dedicated workspaces optimized for BI projects, which allow business users to quickly find and share data and reports with colleagues and collaborate over BI results.

[From the preview in Oct’13 here:] Power BI for Office 365 enables users to quickly create Power BI Sites, BI workspaces for users to share and view larger workbooks of up to 250MB, refresh report data, maintain data views for others and track who is accessing them, and easily find the answers they need with natural language query. Users can also stay connected to their reports in Office 365 from any device with HTML5 support for Power View reports and through a new Power BI mobile app for Windows.

Real-time access to BI Sites and data no matter where a user is located via mobile devices. Customers can access their data through the browser in HTML5 or through touch-optimized mobile application, available on the Windows Store.

A natural language query experienced called Q&A which allows users to ask questions of their data and receive immediate answers in the form of an interactive table, chart or graph.

Power BI for Office 365 provides an easy on-ramp for organizations who have bet on Office 365 to begin doing self-service BI today. Several customers have already started realizing the benefits of the service, including Revlon, MediaCom, Carnegie Mellon University and Trek.

For more information, read Quentin Clark, Corporate Vice President of the Data Platform Group’s, post [here you’ve already seen/read above] on the Official Microsoft Blog. Customers can find out more about how to purchase Power BI for Office 365 at powerbi.com.

[*About C&E News Bytes Blog: Here you will find a quick synopsis of all news from Microsoft’s Cloud & Enterprise organization as it is released with links to additional information.]

One-minute video clip explaining the value of Power BI along with Office 365, focusing on how it addresses business’ pain points (once you get your data insights, how you can share it within your SMB and use the data to its fullest potential).

If you follow Microsoft’s data platform work, you have probably observed some changes over the last year or so in our product approach and in how we talk about our products. After the delivery of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Office 2013, we ramped-up our energy and sharpened our focus on the opportunities of cloud computing. These opportunities stem from technical innovation, the nature of cloud computing, and from an understanding of our customers.

In my role at Microsoft, I lead the team that is responsible for the engineering direction of our data platform technologies. These technologies help our customers derive important insights from their data and make critical business decisions. I meet with customers regularly to talk about their businesses and about what’s possible with modern data-intensive applications. Here and in later posts, I will share some key points from those discussions to provide you with insight into our data platform approach, roadmap, and key technology releases.

Microsoft has made significant investments on the opportunities of cloud computing. In today’s IT landscape, it’s clear that the enterprise platform business is shifting to embrace the benefits of cloud computing—accessibility to scale, increased agility, diversity of data, lowered TCO and more. This shift will be as significant as the move from the mainframe/mini era to the microprocessor era. And, due to this shift, the shape and role of data in the enterprise will change as applications evolve to new environments.

Today’s economy is built on the data platform that emerged with the microprocessor era—effectively, transactional SQL databases, relational data warehousing and operational BI. An entire cycle of business growth was led by the emergence of patterns around Systems of Record, everything from ERP applications to Point of Sale systems. The shift to cloud computing is bringing with it a new set of application patterns, which I sometimes refer to as Systems of Observation (SoO). There are several forms of these new application patterns: the Internet of Things (IoT), generally; solutions being built around application and customer analytics; and, consumer personalization scenarios. And, we are just beginning this journey!

These new application patterns stem from the power of cloud computing—nearly infinite scale, more powerful data analytics and machine learning, new techniques on more kinds of data, a whole host of new information that impacts modern business, and ubiquitous infrastructure that allows the flow of information like never before. What is being done today by a small number of large-scale Internet companies to harness the power of available information will become possible to apply to any business problem.

To provide a framework for how we think applications and the information they generate or manage will change—and how that might affect those of us who develop and use those applications—consider these characteristics:

Data types are diverse. Applications will generate, consume and manipulate data in many forms: transactional records, structured streamed data, truly unstructured data, etc. Examples include the rise of JSON, the embracing of Hadoop by enterprises, and the new kinds of information generated by a wide variety of newly connected devices (IoT).

Relevant data is not just from inside the enterprise. Cross-enterprise data, data from other industries and institutions, and information from the Web are all starting to factor into how businesses and the economy function in a big way. Consider the small business loan extension that accounts for package shipping information as a criteria; or, companies that now embrace the use of social media signals.

Analytics usage is broadening. Customer behavior, application telemetry, and business trends are just a few examples of the kinds of data that are being analyzed differently than before. Deep analytics and automated techniques, like machine learning, are being used more often. And, modern architectures (cloud-scale, in-memory) are enabling new value in real-time, highly-interactive data analysis.

Data by-products are being turned into value. Data that were once considered as by-products of a core business are now valuable across (and outside of) the industries that generate this data; for example, consider the expanding uses of search term data. Perhaps uniquely, Microsoft has very promising data sets that could impact many different businesses.

With these characteristics in mind, our vision is to provide a great platform and solutions for our customers to realize the new value of information and to empower new experiences with data. This platform needs to span across the cloud and the enterprise – where so much key information and business processes exist. We want to deliver Big Data solutions to the masses through the power of SQL Server and related products, Windows Azure data services, and the BI capabilities of Microsoft Office. To do this, we are taking steps to ensure our data platform meets the demands of today’s modern business.

Modern Transaction Processing—The data services that modern applications need are broader now than traditional RDBMS. Yes, this too needs to become a cloud asset, and our investments in Windows Azure SQL Database reflect that effort. We recognize that other forms of data storage are essential, including Windows Azure Storage and Tables, and we need to think about new capabilities as we develop applications in cloud-first patterns. These cloud platform services need to be low friction, easy to incorporate, and operate seamlessly at scale—and have built-in fundamental features like high availability and regulatory compliance. We also need to incorporate technical shifts like large memory and high-speed low latency networking—in our on-premises and cloud products.

Modern Data Warehousing—Hadoop brought flexibility to what is typically done with data warehousing: storing and performing operational and ad-hoc analysis across large datasets. Traditional data warehousing products are scaling up, and the worlds of Hadoop and relational data models are coming together. Importantly, enterprise data needs broad availability so that business can find and leverage information from everywhere and for every purpose—and this data will live both in the cloud and in the enterprise datacenter. We are hearing about customers who now compose meaningful insights from data across Windows Azure SQL Database and Windows Azure Storage processed with Windows Azure HDInsight, our Hadoop-based big data solution. Customers are leveraging the same pattern of relational + Hadoop in our Parallel Data Warehouse appliance product in the enterprise.

Modern Business Intelligence—Making sense of data signals to gain strategic insight for business will become commonplace. Information will be more discoverable; not just raw datasets, but those facets of the data that can be most relevant—and the kinds of analytics, including machine learning, that can be applied—will be more readily available. Power BI for Office 365, our new BI solution, enables balance between self-service BI and IT operations—which is a key accelerant for adoption. With Power BI for Office 365, data from Windows Azure, Office, and on-premises data sources comes together in modern, accessible BI experiences.

Over the coming months, we are going to publish regular posts to encourage discussions about data and insights and the world of modernized data. We will talk more about the trends, the patterns, the technology, and our products, and we’ll explore together how the new world of data is taking shape. I hope you will engage in this conversation with us; tell us what you think; tell us whether you agree with the trends we think we see—and with the implications of those trends for the modern data platform.

With data volumes exploding, having the right technology to find insights from your data is critical to long term success. Leading organizations are adjusting their strategies to focus on data management and analytics, and we are seeing a consistent increase in organizations adopting the Microsoft data platform to address their growing needs around data. The trend is clear: CIOs named business intelligence (BI) and analytics their top technology priority in 2012, and again in 2013.Gartner expects this focus to continue during 2014.2

At Microsoft, we have great momentum in the data platform space and we are proud to be recognized by analysts like IDC reporting that Microsoft SQL Server continues to be the unit leader and became the #2 database vendor by revenue.1Microsoft was named a leader in both the Enterprise Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Waves by Forrester, 3,4and is named a leader in the OPDMS Magic quadrant. 5

The market is growing and Microsoft has great momentum in this space, so this is a great time to dig in and learn more about the technology that makes up our data platform through these great new courses in the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Microsoft’s data platform products

Quentin Clark recently outlined our data platform vision [here you’ve already seen/read above]. This calendar year we will be delivering an unprecedented lineup of new and updated products and services:

SQL Server 2014 delivers mission critical analytics and performance by bringing to market new in-memory capabilities built into the core database for OLTP (by 10X and up to 30X) and Data Warehousing (100X). SQL Server 2014 provides the best platform for hybrid cloud scenarios, like cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery, and significantly simplifies the on-ramp process to cloud for our customers with new point-and-click experiences for deploying cloud scenarios in the tools that are already familiar to database administrators (DBAs).

Power BI for Office 365 isa new self-service BI solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides users with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights from their on-premises and cloud data.

Windows Azure HDInsight makes Apache Hadoop available as a service in the cloud, and also makes the Map Reduce software framework available in a simpler, more scalable, and cost efficient Windows Azure environment.

Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a massively parallel processing data warehousing appliance built for any volume of relational data (with up to 100x performance gains) and provides the simplest way to integrate with Hadoop. With PolyBase, PDW can also seamlessly query relational and non-relational data.

In-depth learning through live online technical events

To support the availability of these products, we’re offering live online events that will enable in-depth learning of our data platform offerings. These sessions are available now through the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) and are geared towards IT professionals, developers, database administrators and technical decision makers. In each of these events, you’ll hear the latest information from our engineering and product specialists to help you grow your skills and better understand what differentiates Microsoft’s data offerings.

Here is a brief overview of the sessions that you can register for right now:

Session Overview: Are you a power Excel user? If you’re trying to make sense of ever-growing piles of data, and you’re into data discovery, visualization, and collaboration, get ready for Power BI. Excel, always great for analyzing data, is now even more powerful with Power BI for Office 365. Join this Jump Start, and learn about the tools you need to provide faster data insights to your organization, including Power Query, Power Map, and natural language querying. This live, demo-rich session provides a full-day drilldown into Power BI features and capabilities, led by the team of Microsoft experts who own them.

Session Overview: If you’re wondering how to use Windows Azure as a hosting environment for your SQL Server virtual machines, join the experts as they walk you through it, with practical, real-world demos. SQL Server in Windows Azure VM is an easy and full-featured way to be up and running in 10 minutes with a database server in the cloud. You use it on demand and pay as you go, and you get the full functionality of your own data center. For short-term test environments, it is a popular choice. SQL Server in Azure VM also includes pre-built data warehouse images and business intelligence features. Don’t miss this chance to learn more about it.

Here’s a snapshot of the great content available to you now, with more to come later on the on the MVA data platform page:

Disclaimer:

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Big data scientists and the finance department haven’t always seen eye to eye in most companies. Now is your chance to embrace big data to free your finance department to focus on the ways to add the most value.

You are invited to join Microsoft Finance DirectorMarc Reguera and members of the Microsoft finance leadership team to find out what they did to become a more empowered and influential finance organization. The powerful new business intelligence tools they will demonstrate have been under wraps for almost two years and have so far only been used within Microsoft.

Now the tools have been road-tested and are ready for you to try. Grab your chance to learn how the Microsoft new BI tools will help your business not only adapt to the world of big data, but actually thrive in it.

Register for any and all of the webinars you are interested in:

1/23/14: Visualization: See how these powerful new tools have improved Microsoft’s ability to consume big data and develop insights by simplifying the data and using visualization tools. Register here.

1/30/14: Definitions: Get the best practices for creating and aligning behind a common set of data definitions and taxonomies. Learn how to get everyone on the same page. Register here.

2/13/14: Outsourcing: Learn how Microsoft worked with partners to optimize and outsource non-strategic finance tasks so the organization could focus on high-value activities. Register here.

2/20/14: Cloud collaboration: Learn how your organization can focus more time on delivering business insights by using Power BI and Microsoft Office 365. Register here.

3/6/14: Making things easy to comprehend without making them simplistic: See how Microsoft finance teams consume and analyze millions of rows of data and present their analysis in a narrative that’s easy to understand for multiple audiences. Register here.

Taken together, this series of webinars will help your company’s finance department adapt to a world of rapidly shifting paradigms and what can be, without the right tools, the overwhelming era of big data.

Businesses are collecting more data than ever before, and technology is making that process increasingly easier and more affordable. The challenge for business owners is 1) how to quickly turn that raw data into actionable business insights, and 2) how to give more people within an organization access to those insights on a self-serve basis.

Organizations must have insight into how their operations are performing in order to stay competitive. Companies who successfully manage their big data assets are more profitable than companies not making this investment, says Jason Baick, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft. Simply put, “[business intelligence] is the eyes and ears of your business,” Baick says.

Release data from the IT department

Data analysis started off as a highly specialized process. “It was always a barrier to self-service information … the treasure trove of the data was locked up in the IT department,” Baick points out. Today there are easy-to-use data visualization tools that offer anyone within an organization access to real-time business insights.

Take the Microsoft Power BI suite, for example, which gives both businesses and the individual an easy-to-use platform to visualize their data. Given that many businesses already have the infrastructure that Power BI is built on (e.g. Microsoft SharePoint) and a familiarity with its feature set, integration and adoption is simplified. Your users don’t have an intimidation factor because they already know how to use Excel, explains Baick. By equipping your employees with these types of tools, you can enable team members to unearth real-time insights, ranging from targeting a prospect at the exact right time to make the sale, to determining where the company can cut costs, to revealing where they should invest more.

Here’s a rundown of specific Power BI tools and what they can offer your business:

Discover and Combine

Search and access all your company’s data and public data from one place using Power Query. Give your team the ability to be more efficient while cutting down on the cost of investing in multiple, disparate data tools.

Model and Analyze

Empower your employees to create analytical models using Power Pivot. Since this is built on familiar software like Excel, you won’t have to worry about the cost of training or having to hire new staff for implementation.

Visualize

Power View and Power Map enables your team members to quickly translate big data sets and create easy-to-understand visuals without a huge time investment.

Share and Collaborate

Seamlessly share and edit workbooks from any device, allowing your employees quick and easy access to important information in real time.

Get Answers and Insights

The new Q&A feature gives your employees the ability to ask any question of their data without requiring specialized skills to draw out these insights.

Access Anywhere

Give your staff access to the Power BI tool set from any device, any location. This empowers your employees to access data in real time, which could mean the difference between making and not making a sale.

How are people using Power BI?

Companies like MCH Strategic Data are already employing the Power BI suite to get more out of their data. MCH collects an enormous amount of education and healthcare marketing data for their clients. After 85 years in the business, they’re now able to deliver new and unique insights to clients like never before. One application has been to create videos using tools like Power Map to create data visualizations showing the geographic range of socioeconomic status across various school districts. They’ve also made subsets of their data available and searchable by Power BI users, including datasets on hospitals, school systems, and emergency preparedness services throughout the US

Building a data-driven organization

Everyone at your company can contribute to uncovering business insights, and it’s important to give them the tools to do so. Using your data in a smart and strategic way enables you to turn it into actionable business insights and to stay ahead of the competition.

We spoke to Jeff Marcoux, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics CRM, about how big data and data insights have changed marketing. He outlined three ways that companies can use big data to reimagine their marketing efforts.

He also outlined an all-encompassing rule when using data insights for marketing efforts: it’s not about how much data you have, it’s what you do with it. “Large data makes graphs, but significant data tells a story,” said Marcoux. Learning how to leverage significant big data into actionable insights is the key to unlocking its potential as an asset to your business. Here are Jeff’s three key ways companies can do smart things with their data:

Embrace the idea that autonomous marketing, or marketing that is auto-optimized and auto-customized according to customer insights and machine-generated learning, can reinvigorate marketing campaigns. The key being it’s a more responsive marketing campaign that continuously strengthens and adjusts itself.

Use customer insights to create strongersales-marketing partnerships by increasing positive brand awareness and generating more accurate information on qualified leads and revenue attribution. In other words, more insight contributing to less finger-pointing and, ultimately, greater partnerships.

Translate data into business impact by building custom sales kits appropriate for every opportunity and every customer, monitoring the end-to-end customer life cycle, and keeping customers hooked. After all, according to Marcoux, “existing customers are the best sellers.”

Data insights will help drive marketing at the deepest strategic levels, providing actionable insights that can constantly be measured against and refined. Remember, it’s not how much data you’ve got, it’s what you do with it. If your organization has started to use data insights in your marketing efforts, do you have any tips on how to better use data? Sound off in the comments!

Personalization is the gold standard for marketing efforts. If you can connect with a customer on a personal level and demonstrate that you understand your audience, the customer is far more likely to respond to your marketing campaigns. It may seem like a daunting task to crunch that much customer information and automatically adapt it to your marketing efforts, but it doesn’t have to be. Technologies exist that allow you to update campaigns with new data (auto-optimize) and use that updated data to better target your efforts (auto-customize), removing the guesswork you’re your campaigns. Marketing that is auto-optimized and auto-customized based on customer insights and machine generated learning—called “autonomous marketing”—is now a tangible reality for many businesses.

Autonomous marketing and big data will be critical in re-imagining a more personalized approach to marketing—and learning to harness this approach will keep your business ahead of the curve as marketing innovators.

Data, data everywhere…

The amount of data available today is overwhelming. Take, for example, a single business—just between the company’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter, there’s a lot to keep track of. All this information needs to be consolidated and combed to figure out which data is significant and what happens next. For many businesses the question becomes: what do I do with my data?

According to Jeff Marcoux, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics CRM, that data should be fed to an engine that’s automatically optimizing itself. In practice, this “auto-optimizing” capability translates into the ability to make campaign improvements in real-time. The result is a more responsive marketing campaign that continuously strengthens and adjusts itself to help dial in on more precise market segments and figure out what’s working.

Getting personal

The clincher, once you’ve honed in on those market segments, is auto-customizing marketing campaigns down to the individual level. “Customers are already so far down the buying cycle when they get to you (nearly 57%) and getting personal is the only way to land your message and have it resonate with consumers,” said Marcoux. Once that same engine is automatically tailoring marketing efforts based on data insights, you’ll know you’ve crossed-over into today’s gold standard for marketing—personalization perfection.

“Autonomous marketing is a beast,” said Marcoux, “once it gets going you just have to pay attention and keep feeding it.” The autonomous marketing beast metabolizes content and, so long as it’s fed plenty of “healthy” (significant) data, it will do its job to improve marketing. In turn, you will gain valuable insight into revenue performance and ROI, this way you can pinpoint which marketing maneuvers were converted into real business impact.

A healthy beast, a happy business

The success of autonomous marketing relies on 2 things: the quality of the data it’s fed and whether you take advantage of the insights it offers. A responsive, personalized approach to marketing is where we’re headed—are you doing everything to make sure your business is headed there too?

How do you retain the creative side of marketing when big data and autonomous marketing inevitably change the way marketers work? Data insights enhance the efficacy of your marketing efforts; however, human input is always necessary to decipher big data. Autonomous marketing, used to enable marketers and nail down effective marketing campaigns, is the secret to realizing business impact.

Metrics for the Mind

The application of autonomous marketing is a necessary next step in meeting a new demand, but it doesn’t supplant the need for marketers in the flesh. According to Jeff Marcoux, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, marketers will never be forced to relinquish their instincts and creativity—their marketing guts—because analytics, data, and insight help fuel creativity.

“The main reason I say that,” said Marcoux, “is because there’s always going to be new channels and marketers have to come up with new ways to use them.” Take for example the exodus of college-age students from Facebook (which Marcoux attributes to the fact that their parents on are on it) to something more like Snapchat. Although data may shed some insight on the shift, it’s up to marketers to take advantage of it in a creative way (e.g., showing loyal fans a secret menu or product announcement before the rest of the world gets to see it).

Take Colorado University’s Online program at their Anschutz Medical Campus, which faced the challenge of how to remain competitive to college students and reach potential students on their own terms. CU used Microsoft Dynamics CRM to identify what their potential students liked, the media they consumed, and the social networks they used—processes that would normally take marketers months of research—and automated it so their marketing team could focus on killer campaigns that would engage the potential students they did find. The result? Increased student retention and recruitment.

Coming up with the emotional content that drives a campaign is where the creativity and experience come in. Marcoux sees autonomous marketing as a way to free up marketers to do what they love—create and innovate—and, today, there’s plenty of opportunity to innovate as campaigns become increasingly personalized.

A Mind-Body Approach to Marketing

Customers don’t want to be just a number; they want to be known. “With social media, everything is personal and everything is online,” said Marcoux. “Hooking” modern consumers is a matter of building those personal, emotional relationships—identifying who they are and what their need is, educating them on a solution, and then ultimately providing that solution.

“We’ve seen that personalization come across in emails and social posts, but that’s all been enabled by big data,” said Marcoux. Customers are already so far down the buying cycle when they get to you (nearly 57%), and getting personal is the only way to land your message and have it resonate with consumers these days.

Autonomous marketing powered by data insights helps marketers gather and combine information from many different sources in order to figure out what content is working. This way, marketers can focus on what is actually selling their product rather than getting petrified by what Marcoux calls “analysis paralysis,” or the misinterpretation and incorrect analysis of data.

Ultimately, autonomous marketing is a way to deal with the deluge of social data and other information to help marketers do their job better. Reimagining marketing, according to Marcoux, is a matter of using big data to narrow in on those granular market segmentations and continuing to fine-tune an effective, personalized marketing approach that will hook and keep hooked customers.

2. Microsoft’s vision of the unified platform for modern businesses

Tune into this bite size video where you will hear Microsoft General Manager, Gavriella Schuster, provide an overview of the Microsoft Cloud OS and how the underlying technologies – Windows Server, System Center, Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Server, and WIndows Intune- can help you cloud-optimize your business today. Interested in learning more? Visit our Microsoft Cloud OS homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/ Ready to try these solutions and experience the benefits first hand? Contact your Microsoft account manager or partner to schedule an Immersion experience today.

When conversation turns to cloud computing, there is a lot of noise. Press, vendors, analysts, bloggers and others deliver opinions on what a successful cloud strategy entails.

Converging technologies such as Big Data, Mobility, BYOD and Social are transforming how businesses operate and compete and are relying on cloud as a critical enabler. Cloud itself is considered an emerging megatrend representing a real opportunity for IT to introduce more efficiency across every operational line of business.

The modern workforce isn’t just better connected and more mobile than ever before, it’s also more discerning (and demanding) about the hardware and software used on the job. While company leaders around the world are celebrating the increased productivity and accessibility of their workforce, the exponential increase in devices and platforms that the workforce wants to use can stretch a company’s infrastructure (and IT department!) to its limit.” Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft

Microsoft believes that cloud is quite simply about a single concept – value. In this article we will share how Microsoft helps you realize the value of cloud, why Windows Server is best suited to take you on the journey, and let you hear how luxury car-maker Aston Martin transformed their business and their IT department by using a Windows Server hybrid strategy.

Your Journey to the Cloud

The true value of cloud is the opportunity for IT to get all the benefits of scale, speed, and agility while still protecting existing investments.

Cloud better enables the introduction of the megatrends of Big Data, Social and Mobile by providing answers to help IT manage risk while delivering quality services and applications quickly, efficiently, securely. As organizations start their journey to the cloud, they typically are grappling with a combination of traditional on-premise and cloud-based solutions; however these hybrid scenarios have the potential to introduce new complications. Working with multiple versions of conflicting operating systems, management tools and applications is usually counter-productive and results in staff frustration, departmental inefficiencies and poor productivity. To be successful, teams need a way to consistently manage, support and automate the datacenter. Microsoft Cloud OS Vision Begins with Windows Server 2012 R2

There are multiple ways for customers to think about how they provision their infrastructure, and we aim to enable an ‘and’ philosophy for our customers so they don’t have to think that it’s an either/or decision. We allow them to take servers and other technology they are running on premises and think about how they might want to move some of it into cloud services, while still having a consistent level of management, identity and security.”Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft GM US Server Tools

Organizations can begin to realize tremendous value with cloud when they leverage the ability to operate and manage a converged infrastructure that shares a common operating system and set of tools across hybrid environments supporting an assortment of devices, applications and users.

At the heart of the Microsoft Cloud OS vision is Windows Server 2012 R2. With Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft’s experience delivering global-scale cloud services enables organizations of all sizes to take advantage of new features and enhancements across virtualization, storage, networking, virtual desktop infrastructure, access and information protection, and more.

Experience Enterprise-class Performance and Scale

Take advantage of even better performance and more efficient capacity utilization in your datacenter.

Increase the agility of your business with a consistent experience across every environment.

Leverage the proven, enterprise-class virtualization and cloud platform that scales to continuously run your largest workloads while enabling robust recovery options to protect against service outages.

Drive Bottom Line Efficiencies with Cost Savings and Automation

Enjoy resilient, multi-tenant-aware storage and networking capabilities for a wide range of workloads.

Re-deploy your budget to other critical projects with the cost-savings delivered through a Windows 2012 R2 Cloud OS.

Automate a broad set of built-in management tasks.

Simplify the deployment of major workloads and increase operational efficiencies.

Unlock Competitive Advantage with Faster Application Deployment

Build, deploy and scale applications and web sites quickly, and with more flexibility than ever before.

Unlock improved application portability between on-premises environments and public and service provider clouds in concert with Windows Azure VM and System Center 2012 R2 making it simple to rapidly shift your critical applications virtually anywhere, anytime.

Increase flexibility and elasticity of IT services with the Windows Server 2012 R2 platform for mission-critical applications while protecting existing investments with enhanced support for open standards, open source applications and various development languages.

Empower Users with Better Access Anywhere

Windows Server 2012 R2 makes it easier to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure making it possible for users to access IT from virtually anywhere, providing them a rich Windows experience while ensuring enhanced data security and compliance.

Easily manage your user’s identities across the datacenter and into the cloud to help deliver secure access to corporate resources.

In Summary

The datacenter is the hub for everything IT offers to the business: storage, networking and computing capacity. The right Cloud OS strategy enables IT to transform those resources into a datacenter that is capable of handling changing needs and unexpected opportunities. With Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft offers a consistent operating system and set of management tools that acts and behaves in exactly the same manner across every setting. Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers the same experience and requires the same skill-sets and knowledge to manage and operate in any environment. Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers a “future-proof” road-map with a fully seamless and scalable platform, making organizations agile, nimble and ready. Highly scalable, Windows Server 2012 is already powering many of the worlds’ largest datacenters – including Microsoft’s – proving out capabilities at cloud scale and then delivering them for the enterprise. With the latest release of Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft is redefining the server category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. The goal of Windows Server 2012 R2 is to help organizations transform their IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.

Aston Martin Uses Windows Server 2012 to Drive IT Transformation

Behind every luxury sports car produced by Aston Martin is a sophisticated IT infrastructure. The goal of the Aston Martin IT team is to optimize that infrastructure so that it performs as efficiently as the production line it supports. To meet that goal, Aston Martin has standardized on Microsoft technology. The IT team chose the Windows Server 2012 operating system, including Hyper-V technology to virtualize its data center and build four private clouds to dynamically allocate IT resources to the business as needed. For cloud and data center management, Aston Martin uses Microsoft System Center 2012.

“The IT team’s purpose is to enable Aston Martin to build the most beautiful sports cars in the world. So, from servers, to desktops, to production line PCs, Microsoft technology is behind everything we do.”Daniel Roach-Rooke, IT Infrastructure Manager, Aston Martin

Watch this short video to learn how the team at Aston Martin envisioned and executed on their strategy.

Call to Action

With Windows Server Data Center 2012 R2 set to release in November, now is the time to see your Microsoft licensed solution provider for information about software savings.

Microsoft’s Cloud OS home on YouTube to find the latest products & solutions news, demos as well as training videos for Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, Windows Intune, Microsoft BI, and Windows Azure—the technologies that bring Microsoft’s vision of Cloud OS to life.

Evolving IT in the Era of the Cloud OS [June 3, 2013] Today’s massive technology shifts are creating new demands on IT. Learn how Microsoft hybrid cloud solutions deliver new innovations that can help you solve the challenges you face now.

TechEd North America 2013 Keynote [June 24, 2013] Despite sea changes in cloud computing, device proliferation, and the explosion of data, IT pros and developers still live for one simple thing: to deliver amazing experiences for their customers and end-users. In this keynote, Brad Anderson will unveil a broad set of new capabilities across the full suite of Microsoft Cloud OS products and technologies designed with that simple end goal in mind. Together with enterprise-optimized enhancements to the Windows 8 client, the advances that Brad will showcase in this keynote significantly advance Microsoft’s long-term effort to give you the most advanced and comprehensive set of services, products, and technologies in the industry. Learn how Windows 8 is ready for business, how Windows Azure is changing hybrid and private cloud computing, and how the world of modern application development is evolving. It’s time to embrace the challenges of a world full of risks and opportunities. See what Microsoft is delivering next, including new enterprise enhancements in the upcoming Windows 8.1 update, and learn what it means for your business as well as your career.

TechEd Europe 2013 Keynote [June 26, 2013] In an era of global technological change, IT pros and developers still live for one basic thing: to deliver amazing experiences. In this keynote from TechEd Europe 2013, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson, will detail Microsoft’s strategy to help customers achieve that simple goal by leveraging new innovations in cloud services, device management, application development, data insights, and datacenter evolution. Mr. Anderson will review a broad set of newly-announced updates across the full suite of Microsoft Cloud OS products and technologies, including Windows Server, Microsoft System Center, Windows Azure, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and more. It’s time to embrace the challenges of a world full of new opportunities. See what Microsoft is delivering next and learn what it means for your business as well as your career.

Microsoft Keynote Highlights from Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Watch highlights from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson‘s keynote address from Oracle OpenWorld 2013 as Brad discusses the Cloud OS vision and how Microsoft and Oracle are working together to bring the power of Oracle’s software to private/public cloud and service providers. This new partnership allows customers using Java, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database to run this software on Windows Azure and Windows Hyper-V.

The following post is from Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server & System Center.

It’s been a little while since I wrote about the work we are doing around the BYO and Consumerization trends – but this is an area I will be discussing much more often over the next several months.

Consumerization is an area that is changing and moving quickly, and I believe the industry is also at an important time where we really need to step back and define what our ultimate destination looks like.

I think there is a great deal of agreement across the industry on what we are all trying to accomplish – and this is aligned with Microsoft’s vision. Microsoft’s vision is to enable people to be productive on all the devices they love while helping IT ensure that corporate assets are secure and protected.

One particular principle that I am especially passionate about is the idea that the modern, mobile devices which are built to consume cloud services should get their policy and apps delivered from the cloud. Put another way: Modern mobile devices should be managed from a cloud service.

One of the reasons I am such a big believer in this is the rapid pace at which new devices and updates to the devices are released. Enabling people across all the devices they love brings with it the need to stay abreast of the changes and updates happening across Windows, iOS, and the myriad of Android devices. By delivering this as a service offering, we can stay on top of this for you. Thus, as changes are needed, we simply update the service and the new capabilities are available for you. This means no longer needing to update your on-premises infrastructure – we take care of all of it for you.

System Center Configuration Manager is the undisputed market leader in managing desktops around the world, and now we are delivering many of our MDM/MAM capabilities from the cloud. We have deeply integrated our Intune cloud service with ConfigMgr so organizations can take advantage of managing all of their devices in one familiar control plane using their existing IT skills. Put simply: We are giving organizations the choice of using their current ConfigMgr console extended with the Intune service, or doing everything from the cloud using only Intune if they wish to do management without an on-premises infrastructure.

On a fairly regular basis I encounter the question about whether or not cloud-based management is robust enough for enterprise organizations. My response to this has surprised our partners and customers with just how powerful a cloud-based solution can be. The answer is a resounding, “Heck yes it is robust and secure enough!”

Windows Intune and Windows Azure Active Directory puts IT leadership in the driver’s seat by allowing an organization to define and manage user identities and access, operate a single administrative console to manage devices, deliver apps, and help protect data.

The result is employee satisfaction, a streamlined infrastructure, and a more efficient IT team – all with existing, familiar, on-prem investments extended to the cloud.

This holistic approach is central to Microsoft’s strategy to help organizations solve one of the most complex and difficult tasks facing IT teams today: Mobile device management (MDM).

As I discussed on the GigaOM Mobilize panel back in October (on the topic of “The Future of Mobile and the Enterprise,” recapped here), it wasn’t that long ago that an IT department worked in a pretty homogenous hardware and software environment – essentially everything was a PC. Today, IT teams are responsible for dozens of form factors and multiple platforms that require specific processes, skills, and maintenance.

Helping organizations proactively manage this new generation of IT is what makes me so excited about the advancements and innovation we are delivering as a part of next week’s update to the Windows Intune service. These updates include:

Support for e-mail profiles that can configure a device with the correct e-mail server information and related policies – and it can also remove that profile and related e-mail via a remote wipe.

In addition to our unified deployment mode and integration with System Center Configuration Manager, Windows Intune can now stand alone as a cloud-only MDM solution. This is a big win for organizations that want a cloud-only management solutions to manage both their mobile devices and PC’s.

There is also support for new data protection settings in iOS 7 – including the “managed open in” capability that protects corporate data by controlling the apps and accounts that can open documents and attachments.

This update also enables broader protection capabilities like remotely locking a lost device, or resetting a device’s PIN if forgotten.

Windows Intune offers simple and comprehensive device management, regardless of the platform, for the devices enterprises are already using, with the IT infrastructure they already own.

Looking ahead to later this year, we will continue to launch additional updates to the service including the ability to allow/deny apps from running (or accessing certain sites), conditional access to e-mail depending upon the status of the device, app-specific restrictions regarding how apps interact and use data, and bulk enrollment of devices.

This functionality is delivered as part of the rapid, easy-to-consume, and ongoing updates that are possible with a cloud-based service.

Today’s announcements are just a small example of the broader set of innovations Microsoft has been developing. Our focus on a people-centric approach to solving consumerization challenges has led to a number of product improvements and updates like:

Company Portals as part of the Windows Intune service (for consistent access to your apps, your data, and your devices across platforms).

The number of factors at work within this Consumerization of IT trend make it clear that to effectively address it we have to think beyond devices and focus on a broader set of challenges and opportunities.

Microsoft is in a unique position to address the holistic needs behind this industry shift with things like public cloud management, private cloud management, identity management, access management, security, and more.

For organizations who haven’t already evaluated Microsoft’s device management solutions – now is the time. With the rapid release and innovation cycle offered by a cloud-based service like Intune, the ability to keep your infrastructure optimized, efficient, and secure has never been easier.

The following post is from Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server & System Center.

In the Day 1 keynote at the recent re:Invent conference, there was an interesting point made about the virtuous cycle that can occur for the cloud vendor and for customers. As I listened to the keynote, I kept thinking: “They are missing the biggest benefit for the entire industry; if the public cloud vendor has the right strategy and is thinking about how to benefit the largest population possible, then they are completely missing how this virtuous cycle can grow to benefit every organization in the world – even if they are not using the public cloud.”

Let me explain a bit more about what I mean. (And, before I get too much farther along, I want to note that this post ties into the cool news yesterday about our work with the Open Compute Project.)

The virtuous cycle of a public cloud looks a lot like the image below. As the usage of the public cloud grows, you need more hardware to meet demand – and for sustained growth you will need a lot of hardware. This need for hardware increases your purchasing power and you can then negotiate lower prices as you purchase in bulk. As your purchasing power grows and your costs drop, you then pass those savings on to your customers by dropping your prices. The lower prices increases demand and the virtuous cycle continues.

For customers using the public cloud, they can see the benefits of this virtuous cycle (the lower prices) – but what about organizations that are also using private and hosted clouds? How can they gain benefits from what is happening?

Organizations with multiple clouds can benefit if (and only if!) that public cloud vendor has at the core of its strategy an intention to take everything that it is learning from operating that public cloud and delivering it back for use in datacenters around world – not just in its own.

This innovation can be seen by applying these public cloud learnings in products like Windows Server, System Center, and the Windows Azure Pack – and these products are the only cloud offerings that are consistent across public, hosted and private clouds – ensuring customers avoid cloud lock in and, maximize workload mobility, and have the flexibility to choose the cloud that best meets their needs.

With this in mind, I want to show you how I think the virtuous cycle can and should look – and how it can benefit any organization in the world.

First, at the center of this virtuous cycle is incredible innovation. This means innovation in software, innovation in hardware, and innovation in processes. When you are ordering and deploying 100,000’s of new servers and xx bytes of storage every year – you have to innovate everywhere or you will literally buckle under demands and costs of procuring, deploying, operating, and retiring hardware at this scale.

Microsoft is addressing this challenge in the most direct and complete way possible: Over the last three years, Microsoft has spent more than $15B building datacenters around the world and filling them with the hardware and capacity demanded by customers of Windows Azure and other Microsoft cloud services.

We keep our public cloud costs low by managing our supply chain for this kind of capacity, and, per the cycle, we pass these savings to you. We also carefully track things like the number of days from when we place an order for hardware to the time the order appears on our docks (“order-to-dock”), and then we track the number of hours/days from “dock-to-live” where we literally have customers’ workloads being hosted on that hardware. Throughout this process we set aggressive quarterly targets and we work constantly to consistently drive those numbers down. If we didn’t have a best in class product and performance, it would be impossible to remain profitable at this kind of scale.

As you can imagine, after spending $Billions on hardware every year, we are highly incented (to put it lightly) to find ways to drive our hardware costs down. The single best way we have found to do this is to use software to do things traditionally handled by hardware. For example, in Windows Azure we are able to deliver highly available, globally available storage at incredibly low prices through software innovations like SDN – all of which is based on low-cost, direct-attached storage. This brings storage economics never before seen in the industry.

One example of this is the most common workload hosted in Azure: The “Web” workload. Whether it is Azure acting as the web tier for hybrid application, or the entire workload being hosted in Azure, the web workload is a part of just about every application. This makes it a great place for innovation. In Azure we pioneered high-density web site hosting where we can literally host 5,000+ web sites on a single Windows Server OS instance. This dramatically reduces our costs, which in turn reduces your costs.

At Microsoft, we think the public cloud’s virtuous cycle can actually get a lot bigger, a lot more functional, and a lot more powerful by integrating service providers and hosted clouds.

Not only is this expanded virtuous cycle more practical, I’m sure it also looks familiar to what is already up and running in your organization.

There are some pretty solid examples of innovation that was pioneered in Azure and then brought to the whole industry for use everywhere through Windows Server and System Center:

Service Bus provides a messaging queue solution in the public cloud that can be used by developers for things like a queuing system across clouds and building loosely coupled applications. Check this post for an in-depth review of Service Bus. Service Bus also ships as a component of the Windows Azure Pack – providing value pioneered in the public cloud for use in private and hosted clouds.

Earlier I referenced the ability to host 5,000+ web sites on a single Windows Server OS instance. This has had an obvious economic impact on of costs of Windows Azure where we host millions of web sites. We proved that capability in Windows Azure, battle-hardened it, and now it ships for customers around to world to use in their datacenters as a part of what we call the Windows Azure Pack (WAP).

This is what it looks like when the complete virtuous cycle is in effect.

Our efforts haven’t been limited to software, however. Our innovative work with hardware in our datacenters has driven down costs while at the same time increasing the capacity each core and processor can support.

Our work with hardware was highlighted yesterday when we announced that we are joining the Open Compute Project and contributing the full design of the server hardware we use in Azure. We refer to this design as the “Microsoft cloud server specification.” The Microsoft cloud server specification provides the blueprints for the datacenter servers we have designed to deliver the world’s most diverse portfolio of cloud services at global scale. These servers are optimized for Windows Server software and can efficiently manage the enormous availability, scalability and efficiency requirements of Windows Azure, our global cloud platform.

This design spec offers dramatic improvements over traditional enterprise server designs: We have seen up to 40% server cost savings, 15% power efficiency gains, and a 50% reduction in deployment and service times. We also expect this server design to contribute to our environmental sustainability efforts by reducing network cabling by 1,100 miles and metal by10,000 tons.

This level of contribution is unprecedented in the industry, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by the media:

Wired: Microsoft Open Sources Its Internet Servers, Steps Into the Future

Forbes: The Worm Has Turned – Microsoft Joins The Open Compute Project

These are just a couple examples of innovation that is happening here at Microsoft – innovations in process, hardware and software.

At Microsoft, we recognize that the majority of organizations are going to use multiple clouds and will want to take advantage of Hybrid Cloud scenarios. Every organization is going to have their own unique journey to the cloud – and organizations should make decisions about cloud partners that truly enable them with the flexibility to use multiple clouds, constant innovation, and consistency across clouds.

This is an area that we focus on every day, and you can read more about it as a part of our ongoing, in-depth series, Success with Hybrid Cloud.

Mr. MidmarketCIO had the opportunity to sit down with Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft’s general manager of the company’s U.S. server and tools business unit. In this interview, Schuster shares her views on the challenges midmarket businesses face today and Microsoft’s vision to address those challenges with the Cloud OS.

MES: Can you share with me a little about Microsoft’s vision of the cloud today and how it can address today’s IT challenges for midmarket customers?

Schuster: Customers face many challenges today with the new levels of mobility in their workforce and the new devices that enable mobility. This new level of consumerization has enabled avid use of technology with an always-on connectivity. There are also many more applications available and an explosion of data to manage. All of these things really challenge customers to reconsider how they provision, secure and enable technology within their organization.

There are multiple ways for customers to think about how they provision their infrastructure, and we aim to enable an ‘and’ philosophy for our customers so they don’t have to think that it’s an either/or decision. We allow them to take servers and other technology they are running on premises and think about how they might want to move some of it into cloud services, while still having a consistent level of management, identity and security.

Our vision for the ‘Cloud OS’ is to really have the best of both worlds. It’s an easy-on/easy-off usage of the cloud that meets the needs of midmarket organizations and can be an extension of current server environments.

MES: Is Microsoft’s ‘Cloud OS’ synonymous with Windows Server 2012? Or does it include other Microsoft technologies?

Schuster: Windows Server 2012 is certainly the basis of the Cloud OS because it provides the primary framework for identity, access, security and manageability, and also provides that core virtualization layer. Windows Server 2012 is also the basis of Windows Azure, our public cloud platform, so it gives midmarket CIOs the ability to easily extend their on-premises datacenter to the public cloud using a common set of tools between the two. The other core technology in the Cloud OS is Microsoft System Center 2012 because it gives customers that common level of additional management where they can set policies, provision their workloads, get deep application insights, etc. regardless of where the workload is actually running—on-premises or in the cloud.

MES: Where do you recommend customers start with their data-center modernization initiative? Why?

Schuster: For most customers, they should start with server virtualization. There is potential for them to get a tremendous amount of efficiency and consolidation of their applications through server consolidation. They can virtualize upwards of 80 percent of all of the apps that they are running in their environment onto virtualized server environments, particularly in the midmarket. They may even be able to consolidate down to one to four servers and really take care of all of their workloads. Using Hyper-V as that virtualization framework and then using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy that new virtual machine into their environment should be their first step to this approach.

MES: What are some of the new capabilities of Windows Server 2012 that go beyond virtualization to solve some common challenges?

Schuster: Windows Server 2012 not only helps midmarket organizations virtualize the compute—the virtualized machine itself—but it also helps them to virtualize their network and storage layers, which can be very costly capex investments for customers. It eliminates a lot of the common conflicts involved in managing an on-premise environment like IP and networking address conflicts. It also gives them additional storage so they don’t have to buy expensive SANs.

MES: A key trend challenging CIOs is mobility and the consumerization of IT. How does the Microsoft Cloud OS vision help address the security and management challenges around new devices and the need for increased mobility?

Schuster: I think it goes back to what I said before—we’ve enabled the ‘and’ so they can think about their governance role. There are a number of ways to address the consumerization of IT, and our primary message is that we think customers should embrace it. We enable them through Active Directory, which enables them to have a single sign-on experience and manage the identity of the user regardless of the environment the user is in (Office 365, Windows Azure, their on-premises environment, etc.)—This eliminates multiple pop-ups where the user has to continually sign in to the service.

We also have native functionality in Windows Server 2012 that eliminates the need for a VPN. With Direct Access, they can now easily deliver access to corporate resources based on the user’s identity.

Lastly, they can set policies for the user experience based on the device that they are using—phone, home machine, work machine, etc.—and can manage those mobile devices from the cloud with Windows Intune, without having to do additional on-premises setup.

MES: You briefly talked about Windows Azure as part of the Microsoft Cloud OS. What workloads do you recommend customers think about moving to the public cloud first?

Schuster: I think the easiest thing for most customers to think about moving to the public cloud first is cloud storage—they can use it for backup, archiving and disaster recovery. Especially as a midmarket customer, the last thing they probably have is a separate site with another set of servers that are replicated and ready to do a transfer if something disastrous were to occur. That’s absolutely something that the cloud is available and ready for. And customers only have to pay for what they use— it’s consumption based. The other areas that they would probably want to use it for are application development and test environments and for business and data analytics.

MES: Microsoft has laid out a hybrid cloud strategy, with the same basic underpinnings for both private and public cloud. What’s the benefit to mid-market customers of adopting Microsoft’s hybrid approach and technologies?

Schuster: When we talk about a hybrid environment, there are two ways to think about it: One is that it’s a hybrid enterprise, meaning they have some workloads that are sitting on servers inside their organization while others are using some server capacity within a public cloud like Windows Azure; Second is having hybrid applications. One of the advantages of the cloud today is that it enables even the smallest companies to act and look like very large companies. Unlike in the past with on-premise servers, the cloud gives CIOs the capacity and capability to introduce a new service to the market where they don’t have to have a great forecast of what the demand might be. This has really opened up new doors for midmarket IT organizations.

MES: How can your ecosystem of partners help midmarket customers today?

Schuster: The midmarket IT customer will typically only have a handful of IT pros within their organization, so enabling them to focus on the business and building applications to help power the business vs. managing servers and infrastructure is a real business value to our midmarket customers—and our partner ecosystem is well set up to help them do that.

We have done a lot of work to train our partners on how to deliver both our on-premise Windows Server 2012 virtualization environment as well as our Windows Azure cloud environments, and we have services available that help our customers build new applications.

This is my conclusion after carefully analyzing the announced products in all of their details. Only “imaging consciousness” needs a little explanation in the very beginning because otherwise the substantial $410 pricing difference would be hard to understand. To illustrate the rationale for that I copied here an image currently available at http://refocus.nokia.com/ which shows that you can make everything in focus. By going to that address you will also be able to experience with the image there (likely a different one) and change the focus as you like. And this is only one aspect of all the benefits for “imaging conscious” business users and individuals willing to pay that $410 extra.

Nokia’s so proud of the display that they put in the Lumia 1520 that they had setup a demo zone that simulated the lighting available during various times of the day e.g. in sunlight, indoors etc and the idea was to see how the screen kept up with the changing lighting. Both devices were set to automatic maximum brightness, and this is how they stood up. Hint: The Nokia killed it.

The Nokia Lumia 1520 features a very bright screen with much reduced glare, which allows much improved visibility in daylight conditions, as demoed in a special light box at Nokia World against and iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4. All devices are at maximum brightness.

As far as the opportunities for business customer are concerned Chris Weber, EVP Sales & Marketing at Nokia said that the opportunity is huge even in 2013:In addition Nokia and Microsoft are uniquely positioned in that space because Nokia smartphones (Windows phones) are rated highest by business users etc. Watch his presentation in Replay Nokia World Abu Dhabi (the second webcast:) Breakout Sessions [Nokia Conversations, Oct 22, 2013], from [1:49:00].

Technical similarities/differences between the two Nokia phablets could be seen in the below table of mine, which was compiled from Lumia 1320 & 1520 spec data + dev specs.Regarding the similarity between the two devices the most important thing is the functionality which is 90% the same. The Lumia 1520 is just different with:– Multimicrophone uplink noise cancellation – HERE Drive+– Secure NFC (although in developer specs it is indicated for Lumia 1320 as well)– Public transportation routing guidance– HERE Transit– Panorama (That is get the bigger picture with Nokia’s easy-to-use Panorama app. Simply take your pictures and the app automatically stitches them into a picture-perfect view. Once you’re done, share your panorama directly to Twitter and Facebook.)– Additional light sensitivities: ISO 1600, ISO 3200, ISO 4000+ Nokia Refocus (as an application on top of that) illustrated in the very beginning of this post already

The Nokia Lumia 1520 is very much the bigger brother of the Lumia 1020, sporting a 6-inch display.

Although it only packs 20 megapixels against the 1020′s 41 megapixels, the results are no less stunning. “The image quality is fantastic” is [National Geographic photographer Stephen] Alvarez’s instant feedback, “every bit of the Lumia 1020′s”. The larger screen makes a difference, too.

“It’s easier to frame because you can see the image much larger,” Alvarez says of the device’s size, “but it isn’t so large that it’s cumbersome”. When doing really careful compositions, Stephen believes the Lumia 1520 makes short work of such tasks, citing the screen as being “remarkable”.

For a professional photographer, the ability to extract DNG (Digital Negative) image files from a device is crucial. Whether it’s to work further on the image in post-production, or whether to prove you have an un-tainted image (if you’re a journalist or gathering evidence, for example). With the Lumia 1520 comes support for DNG files, much to Stephen’s delight when he found out.

Amateur and professional photographers alike benefit from the fact there is zero compression in the file. Pulling more detail out of a shadow is just one example Alvarez offers before pointing out that the file size is comparable to what he sees from his DSLR.

Lumia 1520 features Nokia Rich Recording with four microphones, providing directional stereo recording capability to capture distortion free audio from the preferred direction for clear, accurate sound. (We will have more information to share with you about the Lumia 1520’s audio capabilities soon.)

…

The Lumia 1520 is a genuine workhorse, too. It comes with Microsoft Office built in, so you can have the flexibility to work when you need to; and it includes a massive battery with integrated wireless charging (Qi compatible). This powerful combination means you can manage to easily log a whole day of work and enjoy entertainment like movies without worrying about finding a place to charge up.

The ability to show a third column on the Start screen isn’t just about scaling the experience of Windows Phone 8. It really is about getting to you favorite apps faster with less scrolling. For instance, the email app now shows one additional row of content in the Live tile, right on the Start screen.

Do you do a lot of video conferencing? The front-facing camera on the Lumia 1520 offers 1.2 HD 720p wide angle video so you’ll always look your best.

And, with the new Papyrus app coming to Windows Phone for the first time, you can easily take handwritten notes on your Nokia Lumia 1520.…The Lumia 1520 features all the latest in display technology to make the beautiful six inch screen stand out, even in the brightest sunlight. With ClearBlack display technology, High Brightness Mode and assertive display technology by Apical, the screen offers a viewing experience to enjoy no matter what the light conditions are. And when winter rolls in, wearing gloves won’t prevent you from using the screen just as easily as before thanks to the super sensitive touch screen with Gorilla Glass 2.

he Lumia 1520 is Nokia’s high-end ‘phablet’ Windows Phone released in early November, 2013. Featuring a 6-inch 1080 display and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 2.2GHz quad-core CPU, the Lumia 1520 is Nokia’s first Update 3 device featuring the Lumia ‘Black’ firmware, a rolling cover and a 20 MP camera with a f/2.0 lens. The device also has 32 GB of internal storage and it can take up to 64 GB of external memory (microSD). The Lumia 1520 has a massive 3400 mAh battery life for an estimated 25 hours talk time and 2GB of RAM, making it one of the more powerful Lumias to date. Compared to other Lumias, the 1520 also has 4 High-amplitude audio capture (HAAC) microphones on board to give it excellent audio fidelity on calls and while recording videos. The Lumia 1520 will also feature a new Refocus Lens and StoryTeller apps from Nokia and it comes in four colors, including yellow, white, black and glossy red.

And don’t forget that there is the quite rich common Lumia 1320/1520 functionality (except Nokia Refocus ?for time being?) which is touted by Nokia in the following way:

Continuing to redefine smartphone innovation, Nokia introduces its first ever large screen Lumia smartphones, the Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1320. With a six inch screen and the latest software advancements for Windows Phone, the Lu.mia 1320 and Lumia 1520 are perfectly suited for entertainment and productivity. A new third column of tiles on the home screen means people can see and do more on a larger screen. Bringing larger displays to the award-winning Lumia design, the new format is coupled with some of the most advanced camera innovations so people can capture and share the world around them. … With Microsoft Office built in, documents can be edited and shared easily for maximum productivity.

It includes Nokia Music and HERE Maps for great music and location experiences, and welcomes both Nokia Camera and Nokia Storyteller apps, available in the Windows Phone Store. With the latest apps, the best from Nokia, and the best from Microsoft supported by LTE connections you can make the most out of the bright large screen on the Lumia 1320. Sit back and relax while you play the latest Xbox games, read web content, or watch movies on the six inch screen. A wealth of content can be stored using the free 7GB of SkyDrive storage or with the addition of a micro SD card adding up to 64GB more space.

HERE experiences get an update too! Now with LiveSight in HERE Drive and HERE Drive+ you can easily locate your parked car, while in HERE Transit it will be easier to find nearby transit stations. … The third-party apps line-up for Lumia is significantly boosted with the arrival of … the Instagram photo editing and sharing network, Papyrus and InNote, which both offer handwritten note-taking solutions, and the Vine short-form video service from Twitter – available soon!

From: Papyrus – Use your finger or a stylus to take notes on your Lumia. The vector graphics engine keeps your notes beautiful at any zoom level.

Windows Phone Store is stocked with a full range of certified applications and games, with hundreds more titles added every day. Starting today, Windows Phone owners can download a number of new applications including: CamScanner, Goal Live Scores, InNote, phriz.be, Rail Rush, SophieLensHD and an updated TuneIn Radio application with radio stations live on the Start screen.

The screen real estate afforded by the larger full HD display screens on the Nokia Lumia 1520 (6″) … has already inspired developers to create unique experiences for consumers. … Flipboard, a personal magazine, allows people to read and collect all the news they care about, curating their favorite stories into their own magazines. With Live Tiles … people can digest news faster and easier than ever before. Flipboard will be available … for Lumia smartphones in the coming months.

During Nokia World 2013, Flipboard CTO Eric Feng gave us a rundown of some of the new features that are coming to the Windows version of the popular social-networking and magazine app.

More information:– Replay Nokia World Abu Dhabi – (the 2nd embedded webcast:) Breakout Sessions [Nokia Conversations, Oct 22, 2013]Eric Feng (CTO, Flipboard): [42:15] Quick overview of Flipboard: — World’s first personal personal magazine (curated, personalized and displayed)— ~8000 content partnerships (The New York Times, BBC, AlJazeera, ESPN etc.)— Partnering with world’s 14 leading social networks— A community of a couple of million users who are curating magazines every day— About 4 million magazines curated already on every single day— ~100 million items can be consumed on Flipboard every single day— presented in a beautiful magazine layout— ~90 million people and growing— ~200 countries worldwide[47:10]– Flipboard’s Mike McCue | Disrupt NYC 2013 [TechCrunch YouTube channel, April 29, 2019] Flipboard is a digital social magazine that aggregates web links from your social circle, i.e. Twitter and Facebook, and displays the content in magazine form on an iPad. Here, watch Co-Founder and CEO Mike McCue onstage at Disrupt NY 2013 talk about Flipboard.– Flipboard and Pandora, gamechangers in mobile [This Week In Startups YouTube channel, Oct 15, 2013]Flipboard was one of the first iPad apps that made clear exactly how powerful the experience could be. Blending the best of RSS content with beautiful print-style layout, the app has only gotten better. Now Flipboard’s 85m users can create their own magazines tailored to specific interests. When cofounder and CEO Mike McCue sat down with Jason at LAUNCH Mobile, they dug into how the app has become publisher and platform, changing how we think about and interact with content. Then, a conversation with Tom Conrad, longtime CTO of Pandora. The publicly-traded company has long held sway in the mobile space, transforming how we think about radio by identifying exactly what makes a genre or mood, through its music genome project. Then, putting that tailored-just-for-you radio station into the pockets of its 175m users. Don’t miss these great conversations that point to the future of media in the mobile space.

Today, let’s take a look at our homegrown apps right from the Nokia app factory.

Nokia Camera App demo on Lumia 1520. Nokia Camera is available now to download for all Nokia Lumia PureView smartphones, and coming to the rest of the WP8 Lumia range along with the Lumia Black update early next year. Nokia Camera also has raw file support (DNG format) on Nokia Lumia 1520, and this will be coming to the Lumia 1020 when the Lumia Black update rolls out.

Nokia CameraTwo glorious apps combined into one. Nokia Pro Camera and Nokia Smart Camera have been merged to simplify your photo-taking experience, and ensure you get the perfect shot every time.

The Nokia Camera integrates easy automatic mode, but you can also take control of your camera and become a pro by manually altering focus settings, shutter speed, and ISO as well as using Smart Burst, Remove Moving Objects or create an Action Shot features.

Nokia has a new Refocus app which put Lytro cameras to shame, allowing users to focus on any element of the picture after the fact

Nokia RefocusRather than worry about getting the focus perfect first time, Nokia Refocus takes a photo and lets you choose the focus point after you’ve taken the shot.

[AS AN ALTERNATIVE—to the above one—PRESENTATION] Nokia Refocus lets you readjust the focus after taking the photos. It will be available ON THE LUMIA 1520 AND ALL OTHER PUREVIEW LUMIA DEVICES in mid-november.

This means you can create different expressions of a single photo, changing the same scene in a number of ways by refocusing on the area you want to highlight most. You can also choose to make everything in focus, or magically add colour pop to the focused area for more impact.

Nokia Storyteller

One of the (many) announcements from Nokia World 2013 in Abu Dhabi is Nokia’s new Storyteller app, coming first with the Lumia 1520. We go hands on for a video tour of the new app.

A single app that combines your photographs and videos with HERE location information to create a picture journey. When you take a photo or record a video, you can see precisely where it was taken on a familiar HERE map.

See clusters of photos scattered across the globe and zoom in to an exact location. Plus, zoom out of any photo within the gallery to see where it was shot. You will also notice that your photos truly come live, the videos are played in-line, the action shots are beautifully animated, and the refocus effect is subtly played back to give the immersive feeling when browsing between the images.

Nokia Beamer wins our award for the zaniest thing we’ve seen at Nokia World. The app allows you to share your display, live, to another Windows Phone (or really any device). Just watch the video and expect the app in the coming weeks.

Nokia BeamerNokia Beamer is the ideal way to share what’s on your Lumia display to any internet-enabled screen.

PowerPoint presentations, photos, videos, absolutely anything that you see on your Lumia can be shared, remotely, to anywhere in the world.

It’s like magic, there’s no hassle with connections, and it just works. You beam the screen to a nearby HTML enabled screen, or SMS it to a friend on the other side of the globe. You can even tweet it and let your followers see your screen in real time!

On the other hand—however—the list price of the Lumia 1320 is just $339 vs. the initial list price of the Lumia 520 around $200 when it was released to the market by end March this year. Considering that since then the street price of Lumia 520 went down to as low as $125 (corresponding to Rs.7,714 in India) we may expect that in half year after its Q1 2014 planned release (i.e. in Q3 2014) the street price of Lumia 1320 could become as low as $212 too (iff the sales go as well as for Lumia 520).

In that case the higher by $410 price of Lumia 1520 ($749) will be even less lucrative for an average phablet buyer as it is now (IMHO already not lucrative at all). Look at the list functionality copied here from Lumia 1320 and 1520 spec data, and you will easily understand that (functionality denoted in bold is for Lumia 1520 only):

HERE Maps: Discover the best places in any neighbourhood with HERE Maps. New LiveSight technology reveals interesting places in your display. Explore malls, stations and more with venue maps. Access your favourite places on any HERE app and on here.com.

HERE Transit: Get around by bus, train and subway all in one easy-to-use app. Compare route options, arrival and departure times and walking distances in over 700 cities and 50 countries. Over-the-air updates ensure you always have the latest routes and schedules.

PhotographyPhotography apps

Nokia Camera7: Nokia Camera brings together the features from Nokia Pro Cam and Nokia Smart Cam modes into one application. It gives you the whole exclusive Nokia camera experience with fast access to editing and sharing.

Cinemagraph: A magical blend of photo and movie-like animation, creating pictures that seem almost alive. Helpful on-screen assistance lets you select the animated area of your picture and easily create and edit a cinemagraph. You can share your cinemagraph with friends via social media, email and messaging.

Panorama: Get the bigger picture with Nokia’s easy-to-use Panorama app. Simply take your pictures and the app automatically stitches them into a picture-perfect view. Once you’re done, share your panorama directly to Twitter and Facebook.

Nokia Storyteller: Nokia Storyteller organizes your photos into stories on an interactive HERE map by time and place. Cinemagraphs and smart photos play automatically. See points of interest around the photos taken and pull up contact info, call or email directly from Storyteller, enabling you to authentically re-experience your entire journey when the time comes.

Nokia Music: Unlimited streaming of music for free with Nokia Music. Discover great new music wherever you go. Create your own artist inspired mix or enjoy the mixes from our music experts and celebrity friends. You can listen to your favourite mixes offline and discover live music around you with Nokia Music Gig Finder.

6Downloading of maps over-the-air may involve transferring large amounts of data. Your service provider may charge for the data transmission. The availability of products, services and features may vary by region. Please check with your local Nokia dealer for further details and availability of language options. These specifications are subject to change without notice.

7Nokia Camera comes as an update to Nokia Pro Camera. Available now from Store.

STEVE BALLMER: Tablets is an area where we absolutely have our own first-party hardware, as you know, and see opportunities to continue to build and strengthen. And it’s an area where we have very strong programs in place with our OEMs, particularly on the Intel Atom-processor-based product lines that people will really get a lot of value on, and you’ll see a range of new products coming for the holiday season.

Scaling Windows down?

TERRY MYERSON: It’s definitely a priority for us to bring Windows to as many customers as we can around the world. Lower-price phones is a strategic initiative for the next Windows Phone release, but we have nothing more really to say now.

Acquisition effect on the reorg?

STEVE BALLMER: No [effect], the reorg is absolutely intact. Obviously, the devices business has a broader scale and new capability. Julie Larson-Green, who is running devices and studios is flat out. We’ve got a lot of work we’re doing here over the next several months. And Julie and her team will work on a planning and integration phase. Julie will continue. She’s excited about working on devices, but absolutely, the critical mass of the group with that acquisition is in the phone space, and Stephen Elop will run the group and will take the appropriate steps with Julie working with Stephen to figure out appropriate integrations.

Windows Phones coming from OEMs in the future?

STEVE BALLMER: Today, Nokia, as I said, is well over 80 percent of all of our phones, and I don’t foresee that changing dramatically in the short run, but as the market grows, I expect to see additional percentages, if you will, go to our OEMs, but it’s premature to predict today. We definitely have interest from OEMs in the Windows Phone opportunity given that people understand we’re going to blaze the trails here with our own first-party hardware.

Cost rationalization over time?

STEVE BALLMER: Amy will take it. I do want to highlight that in many hardware companies, manufacturing labor is primarily outsourced. And Amy can remind us the numbers, but in Nokia, there is more in-sourced manufacturing. Nokia has had a strategy about that that, obviously, they’ve executed very well. But you kind of have apples and oranges a little bit between the 32,000 and our almost 100,000. But Amy, why don’t you provide some context and detail?

AMY HOOD: Sure. Thanks, Brent. About 18,000 of those 32,000 employees are really directly a part of the manufacturing business. And so I think a better way as you think about the scale and opportunity is to really focus on the percentage of Nokia outside of that.

I think both Steve and Stephen did a thoughtful job in the execution slide about talking about the philosophy we’re using as we go through the integration process around the benefits of the incremental sales force that we’re getting with Chris and his team, as well as really going through and being thoughtful about the rationalization so that we get to one voice, one brand, one team that can best execute and be efficient.

What was not possible that the acquisition enables now, or is it only ensuring a presence in the smartphone market for a long-term basis, i.e. ‘One Microsoft’ empowerment?

STEVE BALLMER: Well, the latter is certainly true. We see at least three distinct opportunities to do better as one company than as two.

Number one, we talk about one brand and the unified voice to the market. I will say that I think we can probably do better for consumer name than the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 1020. And yet, because of where both companies are and the independent nature of the businesses, we haven’t been able to shorten that. Just take that as a proxy for a range of improvements that we feel we can make, we can simplify, the way in which we work with operators and the overall consumer branding and messaging gets much simpler. That is an efficiency of being one company.

On the innovation front, we’ve done a lot of great work together, and yet as two companies, there’s always some lines along which it’s hard to innovate. The Lumia 1020 is awesome in terms of what it has for camera and imaging, and yet I think as one company we would have doubled down on that bet and made an even greater range of software and services investments around the core hardware platform.

Third, I think we get business agility. As two companies, we’re making two independent sets of decisions about where and when and how to invest by country, by operator, by price point, and there is, let me say, an inefficiency financially as well as a lack of agility that comes with that.

So in all three of those areas, despite the fact that I think we’ve done a really good job, we can improve and accelerate quite noticeably.

How the much needed developer support for the fairly aggressive market share assumption will be ensured?

To which I added the following calculation and judgment in my analysis post: 15% of the 1.7B units in 2018 is 255M units. The ~$45 billion estimated revenue at that time means ~$176 ASP. Considering the latest Q2’13 EUR 157 [$207] ASP of Lumia it seems feasible, but in 5 years timeframe it needs a strong premium strategy to achieve that. … NPV – Net Present Value.

TERRY MYERSON: Well, for developers today, Windows offers an incredible opportunity with the installed base of PCs, phones, and tablets, and soon the new Xbox One. We want to offer them this opportunity to build either HTML5 applications or native applications that span all of those devices, enabling them to reach segments of users on those devices, users in an enterprise, users on a gaming console, and just provide them very unique opportunities to monetize their application investments.

So we’re pretty excited about the platforms we’re bringing to market. Developer reception in some areas is certainly better than others, but overall we’re making progress, and we know we’ve got a lot more work to do.

STEVE BALLMER: One of the keys, of course, is driving volume. We think we have differentiated products. We can tell the story a little bit better. We can get the volume up, and we have over 160,000 applications in the store. We know we have a long way to go, and the key is really offering with our own first-party applications and first-party hardware, enough reasons to buy to drive volumes and then attract the broader developer ecosystem.

Obviously, HTML5 would be kind of a neutral thing. I would expect all the major platforms to embrace it to some extent. And in some senses, it takes away a little bit of the apps barrier to entry, which we know we need to work hard on right now.

Microsoft buys Nokia’s handset business for $7.2 bln. Both companies will be hoping it heralds a new era, but overcoming brand weakness will be a huge challenge. For them both, says IHS Senior Mobile Analyst, Daniel Gleeson.

SHOWS: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (REUTERS – ACCESS ALL) (SEPTEMBER 3, 2013)

1. IHS, SENIOR MOBILE ANALYST, DANIEL GLEESON, SAYING:

JOURNALIST ASKING DANIEL GLEESON: ‘Well is this a good deal for Nokia and is it enough to drag it into the 21st century?’

DANIEL GLEESON: ‘It is a big deal. Whether it’s not- I don’t think it is enough really. You’ve got two titans of the past really kind of clashing together. It does provide Microsoft with the ability to merge the handset and the software side of the mobile businesses together which gives it a better chance of breaking through. However I think Microsoft are probably being overambitious. Microsoft has stated that they’re aiming to get 15% of the smartphone market by 2018 which will be equivalent to somewhere in the region of more than 200 million smartphones. Given that the current Nokia smartphone run rate is somewhere in the region of 30 million units, that’s quite a lot of growth that they’re looking for and practically I don’t think that’s possible.

JOURNALIST: ‘So you don’t think that Apple and Samsung and the like will be quaking in their boots?’

DANIEL GLEESON: ‘Not at the moment. Microsoft had been very slow in developing the Windows Phone platform over the past few years. There’s been very little development on the software side. Most of the innovation on it has actually come from Nokia. So obviously the hope is that Nokia will be able to bring this innovation to Microsoft and spur on the software development. However, with the current reorganization that Microsoft is going through and the fact that Ballmer is going to be stepping aside at the end of the year or within the next 12 months, that is very uncertain. So it remains to be seen about how Microsoft can evolve and adapt to taking in the hardware unit.’

JOURNALIST: ‘Sorry, just going to say, Nokia’s shares rose almost 50% this morning. But the company as we all know is still a shadow of its former self.’

DANIEL GLEESON: ‘Yeah, it very much is. It used- obviously a couple of years ago Nokia was the largest smartphone and handset vendor in the world. It is now I think like behind the many Chinese, smaller Chinese companies in terms of smartphone shipments and dropping rapidly in terms of the handset market. What we see though is that Nokia does have a good future with its NSN business, its network vendoring business. That’s after going through major turnaround over the past while and then past four quarters it’s managed to turn a profit on that. So that’s going to be the future that Nokia’s looking at and that part of the business is looking bright.’

JOURNALIST: ‘Does this deal do anything to address I suppose what is fundamental certainly in the public’s perception of both companies, the fundamental premise that neither brand is cool in anyway whatsoever. I mean the brands are very, very weak. Does this do anything to address that?’

DANIEL GLEESON: ‘Fundamentally it doesn’t because as you said this is just simply the uniting of two uncool brands. This doesn’t make it any better. It’s going to take a lot of investment from Microsoft to try to turn that brand around. Of course the upside of it is Microsoft has much deeper pockets to do this than Nokia on its own would have. So you are in the situation where Microsoft was funneling a lot of cash into Nokia anyway to try to support the smartphone unit. So Microsoft presumably just by taking it in-house is just absorbing that cost and it’s going to be able to push even more money into it to try to build that brand and to make it better in the future.’

Why has Microsoft agreed to buy Nokia’s moible phone business for more than five billion euros? It’s somewhat perplexing to Saxo Bank’s Head of Equity Strategy, Peter Garnry. It’s a great deal for the struggling Finish handset maker, he says. But he has real concerns about how good it will be for Microsoft, one of the world’s leading technology players. Nokia shares rose by around 45% on the open on Tuesday. Peter says it’s also really good news for the company’s bond holders as the company was hemorrhaging cash. However, Peter says Microsoft have paid a lot of money in this deal, which is due to be finalised next year. He says they’re still not as good a hardware company as Samsung or Apple and he adds that nine out of ten acquisitions do not fulfill synergy expectations. He says it’ll be very difficult for Microsoft to integrate Nokia into its business and move it foreward. So where does this leave rival Blackberry, which is already struggling to compete on the smartphone market? Peter says the company should start focusing on what they are good; mobile security and increase shareholder value that way. Nokia’s phone business marks the exit of a 150-year-old company that once dominated the global cellphone market.

OPERATOR: Walter Pritchard, Citigroup, your line is open.

WALTER PRITCHARD: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Steve Ballmer, on the tablet side, obviously, we could say many of the same things as you’ve put into this slide deck as rationale for doing an acquisition on the phone side as we could say about the tablet side including picking up more gross margin.

I’m wondering how this transaction impacts the strategy going forward in tablets and whether or not you need to, in a sense, double down further on first-party hardware in the tablet market. And then just have one follow up.

STEVE BALLMER: Okay. Terry, do you want to talk a little bit about that? That would be great.

TERRY MYERSON: Well, phones and tablets are definitely a continuum. You know, we see the phone products growing up, the screen sizes and the user experience we have on the phones. We’ve now made that available in our Windows tablets, our application platform spans from phone to tablet. And I think it’s fair to say that our customers are expecting us to offer great tablets that look and feel and act in every way like our phones. We’ll be pursuing a strategy along those lines.

STEVE BALLMER: Tablets is an area where we absolutely have our own first-party hardware, as you know, and see opportunities to continue to build and strengthen. And it’s an area where we have very strong programs in place with our OEMs, particularly on the Intel Atom-processor-based product lines that people will really get a lot of value on, and you’ll see a range of new products coming for the holiday season.

WALTER PRITCHARD: And then, Terry, can you talk about just the ability to scale Windows down? Obviously, Nokia has a large base of very low-price feature phones. That base may be sort of dwindling over time, but you’ve been cost-reducing Windows, the specs and so forth, to be able to get Windows down to low-price devices. Can you talk about any efforts to accelerate that process given potentially access to a much bigger pool of low-cost phones that are out there already?

TERRY MYERSON: It’s definitely a priority for us to bring Windows to as many customers as we can around the world. Lower-price phones is a strategic initiative for the next Windows Phone release, but we have nothing more really to say now.

(Break for direction.)

OPERATOR: Our next question is from Mark Moerdler from Sanford Bernstein, your line is open.

MARK MOERDLER: Thank you. Steve Ballmer, two questions: The first one is how does this affect the reorg? Given hardware was in one group and operating systems in another, software in another, does the Nokia device — does the merger affect that? Does it merge into the hardware business, and hardware/content device group? Or does this now change that? And then I have a follow up.

STEVE BALLMER: No, the reorg is absolutely intact. Obviously, the devices business has a broader scale and new capability. Julie Larson-Green, who is running devices and studios is flat out. We’ve got a lot of work we’re doing here over the next several months. And Julie and her team will work on a planning and integration phase. Julie will continue. She’s excited about working on devices, but absolutely, the critical mass of the group with that acquisition is in the phone space, and Stephen Elop will run the group and will take the appropriate steps with Julie working with Stephen to figure out appropriate integrations.

MARK MOERDLER: Excellent. And then as follow up on it, what’s your expectation going forward in terms of — I just want to clarify this — the percentage of Windows Phones that will be from OEMs?

STEVE BALLMER: Today, Nokia, as I said, is well over 80 percent of all of our phones, and I don’t foresee that changing dramatically in the short run, but as the market grows, I expect to see additional percentages, if you will, go to our OEMs, but it’s premature to predict today. We definitely have interest from OEMs in the Windows Phone opportunity given that people understand we’re going to blaze the trails here with our own first-party hardware.

MARK MOERDLER: Thank you very much, appreciate it.

CHRIS SUH: Thanks, Mark. I just want to remind you, we do want to get to as many questions from as many of you as we can. So I do ask that you please just stick to one question and avoid long, or multi-part questions, please. Operator, next question, please.

OPERATOR: Brent Thill, UBS, your line is open.

BRENT THILL: Thanks. Just on the cost rationalization. Nokia has 32,000 employees versus Microsoft at 99,000. A considerable bulk of employees. Can you just talk about the rationalization over time and your view how that plays out?

STEVE BALLMER: Amy will take it. I do want to highlight that in many hardware companies, manufacturing labor is primarily outsourced. And Amy can remind us the numbers, but in Nokia, there is more in-sourced manufacturing. Nokia has had a strategy about that that, obviously, they’ve executed very well. But you kind of have apples and oranges a little bit between the 32,000 and our almost 100,000. But Amy, why don’t you provide some context and detail?

AMY HOOD: Sure. Thanks, Brent. About 18,000 of those 32,000 employees are really directly a part of the manufacturing business. And so I think a better way as you think about the scale and opportunity is to really focus on the percentage of Nokia outside of that.

I think both Steve and Stephen did a thoughtful job in the execution slide about talking about the philosophy we’re using as we go through the integration process around the benefits of the incremental sales force that we’re getting with Chris and his team, as well as really going through and being thoughtful about the rationalization so that we get to one voice, one brand, one team that can best execute and be efficient.

CHRIS SUH: Thanks, Amy. Next question, please, operator.

OPERATOR: Keith Weiss, Morgan Stanley, your line is open.

KEITH WEISS: Thank you guys for taking the question. You guys have talked about the success and the partnership to date in putting out some really good products. I was wondering, Steve, perhaps you could give us some concrete example of what does the acquisition enable you to do that you guys couldn’t do through the partnership? And maybe give us some more concrete examples there. Or is that maybe not the point? Maybe the point is more so that this really solidifies Microsoft’s presence in the smart phone market, and this is more about ensuring that you guys are going to be a presence here for a long-term basis.

STEVE BALLMER: Well, the latter is certainly true. We see at least three distinct opportunities to do better as one company than as two.

Number one, we talk about one brand and the unified voice to the market. I will say that I think we can probably do better for consumer name than the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 1020. And yet, because of where both companies are and the independent nature of the businesses, we haven’t been able to shorten that. Just take that as a proxy for a range of improvements that we feel we can make, we can simplify, the way in which we work with operators and the overall consumer branding and messaging gets much simpler. That is an efficiency of being one company.

On the innovation front, we’ve done a lot of great work together, and yet as two companies, there’s always some lines along which it’s hard to innovate. The Lumia 1020 is awesome in terms of what it has for camera and imaging, and yet I think as one company we would have doubled down on that bet and made an even greater range of software and services investments around the core hardware platform.

Third, I think we get business agility. As two companies, we’re making two independent sets of decisions about where and when and how to invest by country, by operator, by price point, and there is, let me say, an inefficiency financially as well as a lack of agility that comes with that.

So in all three of those areas, despite the fact that I think we’ve done a really good job, we can improve and accelerate quite noticeably.

KEITH WEISS: Excellent, thank you.

CHRIS SUH: Thanks, Keith. Operator, I think we have time for two more questions, next question, please.

OPERATOR: Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal, your line is open.

ROLFE WINKLER: Hi, you guys have 15 percent, a fairly aggressive market share assumption for where you guys are going to go in a few years. I guess I’m wondering, to get there, one thing you’re going to need is a lot of developer support. Developers already have IOS, Android — you can make an argument that HTML5 over the next few years will grow, that will give them a third development platform. How will you guys convince them to develop for Windows Phone?

STEVE BALLMER: Terry, why don’t you talk a little bit about developers, if you don’t mind?

TERRY MYERSON: Well, for developers today, Windows offers an incredible opportunity with the installed base of PCs, phones, and tablets, and soon the new Xbox One. We want to offer them this opportunity to build either HTML5 applications or native applications that span all of those devices, enabling them to reach segments of users on those devices, users in an enterprise, users on a gaming console, and just provide them very unique opportunities to monetize their application investments.

So we’re pretty excited about the platforms we’re bringing to market. Developer reception in some areas is certainly better than others, but overall we’re making progress, and we know we’ve got a lot more work to do.

STEVE BALLMER: One of the keys, of course, is driving volume. We think we have differentiated products. We can tell the story a little bit better. We can get the volume up, and we have over 160,000 applications in the store. We know we have a long way to go, and the key is really offering with our own first-party applications and first-party hardware, enough reasons to buy to drive volumes and then attract the broader developer ecosystem.

Obviously, HTML5 would be kind of a neutral thing. I would expect all the major platforms to embrace it to some extent. And in some senses, it takes away a little bit of the apps barrier to entry, which we know we need to work hard on right now.

CHRIS SUH: Thanks. Operator, let’s move to the last question, please.

OPERATOR: Our last question comes from Rick Sherlund.

RICK SHERLUND: Thanks. I wonder if you could just share with us whether ValueAct was made aware of this before they entered their cooperation and standstill agreement.

STEVE BALLMER: Brad, do you want to take that?

BRAD SMITH: The answer is no. You would not expect the company to disclose material, non-public information to an entity that doesn’t have an appropriate non-disclosure agreement. So the answer is no.

RICK SHERLUND: Okay, thank you.

CHRIS SUH: Okay, so that will wrap up our call today. Thank you, again, for joining us. We look forward to seeing many of you at our financial analyst meeting, which will be held on September 19th. Thanks again.